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NEW BIQGRAPH 



OF 



ILLUSTRIOUS MEN. 



BY 

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, 

HENRY ROGERS, THEODORE MARTIN, 

AND OTHERS. 



BOSTON: 

WHITTEMOEE, NILES, AND HALL 

1857. 



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Bntered Recording to Act of Co:ipres«. in the \«:ir In'.T. bjp 

WHITTEMOtlM, NII.KS. AND BALL. 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the DUtrirl of MawarhaMtti 



CAMiilii i> <; r : 
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By exchange 
Army <Sc Navy Oluc 



DEC 6 WC 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Introduction v 

JOSEPH ADDISON 1 

BT WILLIAM SPALDING. 

FRANCIS ATTERBURY 19 

BY THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. 

FRANCIS BACON 37 

BY WILLIAM SPALDING. 

JOSEPH BUTLER .......... 61 

BY HENRY ROGERS. 

JOHN HOWARD 85 

BY HEPWORTH DIXON. 

JOHN BUNYAN 106 

BY THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. 

HORACE 123 

BY THEODORE MARTIN. 

ROBERT HALL S 144 

BY HENRY ROGEES. 



(hi) 



IV COM IN 

SIR JOHN FRANKLIN 166 

BY MB JOHH in< 11 \i.' 

BOHEB IN 

BY JOHB KUABS BUUUBi 

OLIVl.i: GOLDSMITH 224 

II V TBOJfAfl I. AIWV. rOli MAi A I LAT. 

EDWARD GIBBON 

i-.v 111 m:v k.m.i R& 

GASSEND1 2*9 

BY HIM-.Y BOGKB8. 

JAMES CBICHTON 

BY i>\\ n> h:\in... 

SAMUEL JOHNSON 319 

u\ uii'Mas BABIHOTOH UAi ui \\. 

BIB HUMPHRY DAYI Ml 

IV ,I\MI. DAMP 1 01 

DAVID HUME 379 

iiv in RBI BOQI BBi 



INTRODUCTION 



The contents of this volume have been collected 
from the Eighth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Bri- 
tannica, which is now passing through the press. 
The magnitude of that work places it quite beyond 
the reach of most persons; yet these Biographies 
which it entombs are such as every one would gladly 
possess. I am sure of rendering a grateful service 
to the public by disinterring and placing them within 
the reach of all. 

The brevity of these compositions will recom- 
mend them to the mass of readers. Few persons 
have leisure to peruse voluminous memoirs of every 
distinguished man, yet few persons would be con- 
tent to forego all knowledge of such men. A com- 
pact Biography like these, presenting a clear and 
distinct outline of the life, and producing a clear 
and distinct impression of the character, meets the 
necessity. Nor does this condensation involve the 
sacrifice of any essential feature. " I think," re- 
marks Peter Bayne, "that Mr. Carlyle has demon- 
strated that a biography can be given in the com- 
pass of a review-article ; his essay on Burns I con- 

A* (5) 



VI DfTBODUCTIOH. 

sider, in the full signification of the term, one of 
the most perfect biographies i ever looked ii 
Mr. Bayne has famished illustrations of his remark 
not Less convincing, in his biographical chapte 

Budget*, Wilberforce, and others. 

For the few men of learned Leisure, works volu- 
minous with detail, like BoswelPs Life of Johnsonf 
must still be printed; but those who must rim as 
they read will demand biographies that can be com* 
prehended "within the compass of a review-article." 

Some of the writers of these pieces are possibly 
but little known to the general reader, nor am I able 
to add much to his information beyond the statement 
that they are among the select contributors to the 
Encyclopaedia. Mr. SPALDING, the author of the first 
and third pieces, is Professor of Logic ami Meta- 
physics in the University o( St. Andrews. lie is 
the author o( a History of English Literature and 
Of a work on Italy and the Italian Isles. Besides 
the sketches of Addison and Hacon. he has Con- 
tributed to the Faicvclopaulia two articles ^\ some 
length under the words "Fable" and -Fallacy." 
His style Lb agreeable, and his literary and moral 

judgments arc mild but discriminating and inde- 
pendent Mr. DlXOS is known ;is a popular writer, 

chiefly through his book on Prison Life in Europe. 
Hia controversy with Macaulay respecting the char- 
acter o\ William Penn has also contributed to give 

currency to his name in the literary world. II.- 

sketch o( Howard in this volume is a remarkable 



* Tlir Christian Life, Soda! snd [ndiriduaL Bj Peter 1 

M. A. Boston : Gould & Lim oln, i - 



INTRODUCTION. vii 

specimen of rapid and condensed narrative. For 
those who, like Mr. Gradgrind, delight in pure facts 
unmixed with criticism or speculation, this Biogra- 
phy will prove one of the most attractive of the 
series. 

The Life of Horace, by Theodore Martin, is 
a composition of which any writer might be proud. 
Seldom have classical erudition and elegant writ- 
ing been more gracefully combined. The author 
of such a piece should be distinguished in the 
republic of letters ; yet, so far as I am aware, he 
is quite unknown. It does not appear that he has 
ever published any thing over his own name, 
although it stands high on the roll of contributors 
to the Encyclopaedia. Quite by accident, however, 
I have discovered that he was a joint author with 
Professor Aytoun of the brilliant and amusing Book 
of Ballads by Bon Gaultier. But as that book 
was published anonymously, it is impossible to 
discriminate the parts that came from Mr. Martin's 
pen. This Biography of Horace stimulates the hope 
that a scholar of such fine accomplishments will 
neither let his pen lie idle, nor continue to hide his 
light under a bushel. 

The interest that still surrounds the name of Sir 
John Franklin will make the Life of that distin- 
guished but ill-fated navigator, by Sir John Rich- 
ardson, a welcome portion of this volume. Sir 
John was peculiarly fitted for his task. Himself 
an arctic navigator of note, and an associate of 
Franklin for many years in the line of his profes- 
sion, he possessed a familiar knowledge of the 
whole subject that invests his account with the 



Vlll INTRODUCTION. 

character of authority. Nor is he an unpractical 
writer. Several publications have proceeded from 
his pen, among which may be named a Voyage 
through Rupert's Land for Franklin, and a Voyage 
of the Erebus and Terror. Of a different descrip- 
tion, in matter and style, is Mr. Bl.ukikV article on 
Homer. It is more a piece of criticism than a Biog- 
raphy. What little there was to be told about 
the life of Homer Mr. Blackie has well told ; but 
the main portion of the essay is devoted to a dis- 
cussion of the famous Wolfian theory M nniiilpg 
the integrity of the Homeric Poems. Mr. Blackie, 
like a true Scotchman, takes the side o( common 
sense against German speculation. The article 
throughout is a piece of vigorous argumentation, 
and does credit to his position as the Professor oi' 
Greek in the University of Edinburgh. Professor 

Blackie is the author of a work on the Pronuncia- 
tion of Greek and Latin Quantity, o\ ; . on 
Plato in the Edinburgh Essays for L856, and o\ a 
volume of poems, just from the press, entitled, L 

and Legends of Ancient Greece, With other Poems. 

The sketch of James Crichton will make the reader 
acquainted with a remarkable person respecting 

whom his curiosity may have hecu piqued l>v fre- 
quent hut always hare allusions to him, by English 

writers, as "the admirable Crichton." It isaeuri- 

oue history | and on this account I have decided to 

include it in the present collection. The author o\ 
it, D\\ii> li;\i\<;, IS a vcieran litterateur, hut i- more 
distinguished for his erudition than for hi- >tvle. 
This, however, is one of Ins happiest effort* Bt> 

sides various contrihut ions to the Encyclopaedia, 



INTRODUCTION. i x 

Mr. Irving has published several works in his own 
name. 

James David Forbes, the author of the sketch 
of Sir Humphry Davy, holds an eminent position 
among men of science. He- is Professor of Nat- 
ural Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, and 
corresponding member of the Institute of France. 
It marks the estimation in which he is held, that he 
was selected to continue the history of Mathemati- 
cal and Physical Science which was so admirably 
commenced by Professor Playfair and Sir John Les- 
lie in the earlier Dissertations attached to the Ency- 
clopaedia. In the Sixth Dissertation, now just pub- 
lished, Professor Forbes brings the history down to 
the year 1850. It is a volume by itself, and is as 
entertaining as it is instructive. The sketch of Sir 
Humphry is from this Dissertation. It is distin- 
guished less by biographical detail, than by an elo- 
quent and perspicuous account of the great chemist's 
brilliant discoveries, a warm appreciation of his gen- 
ius, and a beautiful delineation of his character. 

The dii majores of the volume are Henry Rogers 
and Thomas Babington Macaulay. They differ 
from each other in glory, but each has an assured 
position in the pantheon of literature. An elaborate 
discussion of their merits does not fall within the 
scope of this Introduction, but an outline of their 
histories may find here an appropriate place. 

Of Henry Rogers I have been able to gather but 
meagre notices. He was educated for the ministry 
at Highbury College, and for a few years was set- 
tled as the pastor of an Independent congregation. 
This charge he was compelled to resign in conse- 



X INTRODUCTION. 

quence of ill health. He next became Pro 
of the English Language and Literature in Univer- 
sity College, London, but resigned that chair on his 
appointment as one of the Professors in the Inde- 
pendent College at Spring Hill, Birmingham. This 
position he still continues to occupy. 

Mr. Rogers is widely known as one of the ablest 
contributors to the Edinburgh Review. The irreater 
part of all that he has published first appeared in 
that repository of choice literature. Among the 
most striking of these pieces are those on the 
Genius of Plato, Recent Developments of Pusey- 
ism, The Vanity and Glory of Literature. Descartes, 
John Locke, and Reason and Faith, their Claims 
and Conflicts. This last essay attracted much at- 
tention when it first appeared, and an edition o( it in 
a separate form was published in London, 
lection of these Kssays in three octavo volumes 
WB8 published some years since by Longman oi 

London, and more recently a duodecimo edition 

o( tiie same has been issued from the same press. 

A portion iA' the Kssays has also been reprinted in 
this country. The whole collection constitul 

monument such as few periodica] writers have built 

for themselves. 

Bui the chief fame of Mr. Rogers rests upon his 

work entitled. The EclipM of Faith, This is un- 

questionably the finest specimen of Bocratifi r« 

ing in the English language. Its chief aim was to 

Unearth and refute the subtle inlidelities of" Francis 
William Newman and Theodore Parker. The blow 
struck home, and forced from Mr. New man a sharp 

outcry. ( ha putting out a new edition of his own book 



INTRODUCTION. xi 

he added a chapter of angry reply to his assailant. 
This speedily drew forth a Defence of the Eclipse 
which gave the author of Phases of Faith his coup 
de grace. The American heresiarch prudently kept 
silence. Both the Eclipse and the Defence have 
been reprinted in this country with great gain to 
the fortunate publishers. Of the Biographies in 
this volume, Mr. Rogers contributes a larger number 
than any other writer. All of them are upon sub- 
jects congenial to his habits of thought, and all 
bear marks of his genius. 

It remains only to sketch the career of the most 
brilliant Essayist, the most popular Historian, and 
the greatest Master of Style in modern times. 

Thomas Babington Macaulay is of Scottish de- 
scent. His great-grandfather was Aulay Macaulay, 
minister of Harris. His grandfather, John Macau- 
lay, was also a Presbyterian minister, first in the 
island of South Uist, and afterwards in the High- 
land parish of Cardross. He received a visit from 
Dr. Samuel Johnson during his tour in the Heb- 
rides, and is favorably mentioned in the Narrative 
of that celebrated Johnsonian exploit. The daughter 
of this John Macaulay married Thomas Babington, 
a rich English merchant, from which circumstance 
it is probable that the Historian came by his name. 
His father, Zachary Macaulay, is distinguished in 
the annals of philanthropy as the associate of Wil- 
berforce, Clarkson, and Stephen, in accomplishing, 
after a struggle of twenty years, the overthrow of 
the British Slave-trade. A monument to his mem- 
ory in Westminster Abbey marks the national sense 
of his character and public services. The wife of 



Xll INTRODUCTION. 

Zachary Macaulay was Sclina, daughter of Mr. 
Thomas Mills, a Bristol bookseller. Thomas Bab- 
ington, their son, was born at Rothley Temple, Lei- 
cestershire, October 25, 1800. I have met with no 
account of his earlier years. In 1818 he entered 
Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was «rad- 
uated with high distinction. In 1821 lie was elected 
to the Craven Scholarship; took his degree as B. A. 
in 1822; became Fellow of his College in 1824, and 
M. A. in 1825. He was destined for the legal pro- 
fession, and in 1826 was called to the bar at Lin- 
coln's Inn. He was not, however, inclined to seek 
forensic celebrity. Already he had entered upon 
that path in which he was to win his greatest lame. 
In 1824, he published some poems in the Etonian, 
and in Knight's Quarterly Magazine : and in 1825, 
he made his first contribution to the Edinburgh 
Review. Among those early poetic pieces the I 
known are the ballads o( the Spanish Armada, and 

of the Battle o( hnry. 

Ere long the political arena was thrown open to 
him. The leaders Oi the Whig party, attracted bv 

the splendor of his rising genius, complimented him 
with the appointment o\ a Commissioner of Bank- 
ruptcy. Under the same influences he entered par- 
liamenl in L830, as a representative for the Marquis 
n( Lansdowne's borough of Calne; and aboui the 

Same time hew a- made Secretary to the Hoar.: 

Control. His maiden Bpeech was made in support 
of Mr. Grant's motion for leave to bring in a Hill to 
repeal the Civil Disabilities o\ the Jews. Then fol- 
lowed the memorable Debate on the Reform Hill, 

which was the making ^( his political fortunes, In 



INTRODUCTION. xiii 

that Debate he is said to have taken a part " second 
only in influence to that enacted by the present Earl 
of Derby." His oratory had all the brilliancy of 
his essays.* An acute observer who listened to one 
of his speeches on the occasion described him as 
having "clothed himself in the Reform Bill as in 
a mantle of light." His growing fame as a parlia- 
mentary orator now commended him to a more 
influential constituency, and accordingly, in 1832, he 
was returned as one of the two members for the city 

* Mr, Therry, formerly a reporter for the London Morning 
Chronicle, and now, I believe, an Australian judge, has recently 
communicated to the public the following anecdote : — "At the 
Annual Anti- Slavery Meeting (I think of 1826) Mr. Macaulay, 
whose fame as a brilliant speaker at ' The Union Society ' at 
Cambridge, and a Society of the same name in London, had 
preceded him, delivered the first of those brilliant orations with 
which the country has been since delighted. At its close, I told 
Mr. Macaulay that, from his rapid mode of speaking, and from 
so much of the merit of the speech being dependent on the ac- 
curate collocation of the words in which his many metaphors 
and figures were expressed, it would be only an act of justice to 
himself to furnish a report of the speech. At first he hesitated, 
and expressed some doubt whether he could furnish sufficiently 
ample notes for the purpose ; — but said 'he would think of it,' 
on my telling him if he thought proper to do so, I should pay 
due attention to the notes, provided he forwarded them to the 
' Morning Chronicle ' office by eight o'clock that evening. On 
coming to the office of the ' Morning Chronicle ' at that hour, I 
found a large packet containing a verbatim report of the speech 
as spoken — the brilliant passages marked in pencil, and the' 
whole manuscript well thumbed over, furnishing manifest denote- 
ment that no speech in < Enfield's Speaker ' was more laboriously 
and faithfully committed to a school-boy's memory, than was his 
first essay in public eloquence committed to memory by the great 
historian of the age." 

B 



XIV INTRODUCTION. 

of Leeds. This translation from the representative 
seat of a rotten borough of five thousand inhabitants 
to that of a rich commercial city of a hundred and 
fifty thousand was sufficiently striking.* In 1^34. Mr. 
Macaulay resigned his seat and went To the E 
as a member of the Supreme Council of Calcutta. 
That lucrative post he enjoyed for three years. 
Many officials would have been content with only 
enjoying it; but Mr. Macaulay improved the leisure 
it allowed and the opportunities it afforded to make 
himself at home in the obscure annals of British 
India. One result of these studies were his mag- 
nificent histories of Lord dive and Warren Hasting*, 
From India he returned to England, and in L839 
became Secretary-at-War in Lord Melbourne'- Gov- 
ernment. In 1840 he was returned to parliament 
by the city of Edinburgh. The same year marks 
his first introduction to the world as an author. 
The honor of having brought him out in that char- 
acter belongs to this country. Although well known 
in circles at home as a Leading contributor to the 

Edinburgh Review, he yet had never published any 
thing in his own name when, in L840, the first two 
volumes of his Essays were issued from a Boston 
pros. There is a little piece o( history connected 
with the origin o\ that publication which, as I had 
some hand in the business; I may very well relate 

here. 

It happened in ihe year L838, while 1 wa> pur>u- 

* By thi- passnjjo of tlu> Reform Bill, which was n hugely the 
work of Mr. Ma. .-oil. iv. Calne wu deprived of one of ita two 
members; bo thai be maybe said in ■ manner to havekieked 
down the Ladder by which be mounted bo political eminence. 



INTRODUCTION. XV 

ing my professional studies in one of our New 
England seminaries, that my attention was first 
called to an article on Milton in the Edinburgh 
Review. It was commended to my perusal -in such 
laudatory fashion that I was induced to seek it out. 
The volume proved to be out of the library, and I 
soon discovered that it was scarcely ever in. Like 
other favorite books among collegians, it travelled 
from hand to hand, being promised in advance by 
one to another, and lingering in the library only 
just long enough to be transferred on the librarian's 
books. There was nothing for me to do but to 
hunt up the last promissee, place myself a la queue, 
and await my turn. In due time the coveted 
volume came into my possession. Its appearance 
was sufficiently marked. A broad dark stripe along 
the edges of the leaves through the middle of the 
volume plainly indicated whereabouts the essay was, 
and with what devotion it had been thumbed. It 
is needless to say that it gave me the same exquisite 
pleasure that it has given to every one of its million 
of readers. Very naturally, I inquired who might 
be the author of such a splendid piece of composi- 
tion. The reply was that " it was said to be writ- 
ten by a Mr. Macaulay." In answer to my next 
inquiry whether he had written any thing else, I 
was told of an article on Hallam's History of Eng- 
land which was generally thought to be by the same 
hand. Another on Machiavelli was spoken of more 
doubtfully. These were all about which any thing 
was known. I procured them both and soon satis- 
fied myself of their genuineness. 

By this time I felt very much like a prospecting 



XVI INTRODUCTION*. 

gold-digger who has come upon indications of a rich 
placer. I inferred that the author of such remark- 
able pieces was probably a regular contributor to the 
Review*, and that in the twelve years which had then 
elapsed since the publication of the article on Mil- 
ton he had furnished many others. I therefore 
myself to explore ab initio the bound volumes of 
the Review. Each article was examined and judged 
by its style. Some were so manifestly alien in 
structure and diction To the Milton article as to be 
quickly rejected. Others simulated the style of that 
piece so nearly, in some points, as to make a 
more prolonged consideration necessary. But I 
soon came to learn that there was one characters 
which invariably distinguished .Mr. Macaulay'a style. 
This was the absence of the parenthesis. In all the 
ten or twelve volumes of his works. 1 do not think a 
single instance of this inelegant characteristic can be 
found. Nor is such omission the result o( an uncon- 
scious habit of mind. Mr. Macaulay has evidently 
excluded that form o( expression from his composi- 
tions out ot" malice prepense ; and one can see that 
the whole structure oi his sentences i- radically 
modified by his hostility to the interloping clause 
Relying, then, on this mark, I found the task o( 

selection, within eta-lain limits, by no means diffi- 
cult If 1 was left for a while in doubt respecting 
any article, the occurrence of a parenthesis would 

(Mid the doubt and lead at once toits rejection. The 

converse of this, however, did not follow-; the efl 
of the criterion was only negative. The presence 
of the parenthesis was sufficient to warrant a de- 
cision against the article under examination, but 



INTRODUCTION. XVU 

its absence was by no means sufficient to warrant 
a decision in its favor. Other characteristics, with 
which the public have long since become familiar, 
assisted in making up the judgment. 

As the result of my explorations, I discovered 
twelve additional articles which I was satisfied were 
from the same hand that wrote the three already 
named; and on submitting them to some of my 
fellow students I found my judgment confirmed by 
theirs. I now conceived the design of having these 
pieces collected and published. No sordid hope 
of gain mingled in the motives to this design ; on 
the contrary, we tyros were so enamoured of these 
charming essays that we were willing to pay gener- 
ously for copies to place in our nascent libraries. 
Such a design I indeed felt to be not a little pre- 
sumptuous ; for so great was my reverence of a 
book that I could not well conceive of myself as any 
part of the producing cause of such an existence. 
However, having occasion soon after to visit Boston, 
I took along my list, and with no small misgivings 
placed it in the hands of Weeks, Jordan, and Com- 
pany, then a young and enterprising publishing 
house. I referred them to the similar collection of 
Carlyle's Essays which Ralph Waldo Emerson had 
introduced to the American public not long before, 
and told them that in whatever degree that venture 
was likely to prove successful, in a still greater degree 
was this likely to prove so, inasmuch as the style of 
Macaulay was more to the popular taste. Having 
exhausted my little stock of argument, I left the 
matter with them to consider and returned to my 
studies. Within a week after, I received by post 



XVlii INTRODUCTION. 

an imposing printed Prospectus announcing u Ma- 
caulay' s Miscellanies " for immediate publication, and 
giving my list as the table of contents. The flutter 
of delight into which I was thrown by this hardly ex- 
pected response to my proposition did not prevent me 
from perceiving that the worthy publishers were get- 
ting on much too fast I therefore hastened to remind 
them that the list was as yet only conjectural, and 
would need to be authenticated before publication. 
This, then, was the next point to be attended to. A 
consultation was held among those who sympathized 
in the scheme, as the result of which it was agreed 
that myself and another of our number should 
address both Mr. Macaulay and the Editor of the 
Edinburgh Review on the subject. Accordingly, 
each of us prepared an elaborately respectful letter, — 
the one for Professor Napier and the other for the 
Essayist, — announcing the scheme, transmitting the 
list, and asking for its authentication, with the 
addition of any other articles that might have 
eseaped our notice. It is scarcely necessary to say 
that no answer was ever returned to these boyish 
epistles. 

Meanwhile, a monetary paralysis prostrated the 4 
business of the country, and for a lime the project 

was left to slumber. When the crisis was past it 

was revived, and the publishers having learned that 
the late Professor Norton, o( Harvard Cottage, had 

a personal acquaintance with Mr. Macaulay, placed 

my list in his hands with the request that he would 

get it authenticated The Professor kindly under- 
took the service, and in due time received a letter 
from Mr. Macaulay in which he acknowledged each 



INTRODUCTION. XIX 

of the articles as his own, and named one or two 
others which, I think, had appeared in the Review 
subsequent to my exploration. The letter was for a 
short time in my possession, and I well remember 
the substance of two things which it contained. 
One was a strong disparagement of the article on 
Milton ; the other was a statement that the article 
on Church and State, then just published, was mak- 
ing some stir in England. It was apparent that of 
these two offspring of his genius the first-born was 
by no means the favorite child. They do indeed 
differ, but it is as one star differeth from another. 
Mr. Macaulay had no need to be ashamed of an 
Essay which contains the finest passage on the 
Puritans in the language, and which sent Robert 
Hall in his old age to the study of the Italian 
tongue. To return ; the work was now speedily 
published, and some months later, on meeting one 
of the publishers, I inquired after its success. He 
informed me that a thousand copies had been printed 
in the expectation that all of them might be sold in 
one or two years, with which result he would have 
been well content. Instead of that, however, he said 
that the whole edition had gone off in four months, 
and that five hundred more could have been dis- 
posed of in the same time. But unfortunately, the 
work had not been stereotyped. So moderate at 
first were the expectations entertained of an author 
for every fresh product of whose pen rival publishers 
of three great American cities now watch with all 
the greed of a California gold-digger. 

In 1842, Mr. Macaulay published his Lays of 
Ancient Rome. Within the narrow but correspond- 



XX INTRODUCTION. 

ingly difficult department of poetry to which they 
belong, these poems stand unrivalled. In 1843, he 
put forth a selection of his contributions to the 
Edinburgh Review, in three octavo volumes. In 
the brief preface to this collection he stated that 
the step was taken in order to protect the publishers 
of the Review against the American edition, of 
which many copies had been imported ; but at the 
same time he professed to regard the essays BS un- 
worthy of that permanent place in English litera- 
ture which such a step seemed to imply. He also 
took occasion to reiterate before the public the senti- 
ments which he had expressed in private respecting 
the article on Milton. " It was written." he says, 
"when the author was fresh from college, and con- 
tains scarcely a paragraph such as his matured judg- 
ment approves." Whatever he might say, however, 
it is plain that he felt a larking kindness for the 
piece, since he neither excluded it from his collec- 
tion, as he did some other pieces, nor did he PS- 
model or even prune it, but sent it forth again, 
still, as he says, "overloaded with gaudy and mi- 
graceful ornament." The little preface was note- 
worthy on (me other account ; it contained a frank 
acknowledgment of the injustice which its author 
had formerly done to a distinguished writer — Mr. 
Mill — when reviewing his writings on political eron- 
omv. The grace of this acknowledgment was height- 
ened h\ the omission of the obnoxious essajB from 

the collection. 

On the return of the Whigs to power in I s 16, under 
Lord John Russell, Mr. Macanlay was made Paymas- 
ter-General of the Forces with a Beat in the Cabinet; 



INTRODUCTION. XXI 

and for a time he exercised the functions of his 
office. The Maynooth Grant, however, of which he 
was in favor, occasioned a serious disagreement 
between him and his constituents ; and in conse- 
quence, at an election in 1847, Edinburgh rejected 
him and put in his place a Mr. Cowan, whose ' theo- 
logical bias and ecclesiastical views ' were more con- 
sonant with its own. While this exclusion from 
parliament was still a subject of regret, a rumor flew 
abroad that he was to devote the leisure thus 
secured to writing the History of England. High 
expectations were raised, which were more than sat- 
isfied, when, in 1848, the first two volumes were 
laid before the world. In the same year he was- 
chosen Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, 
and in the year following was nominated Professor 
of Ancient History in the Royal Academy. At a 
general election, in 1852, he was again put in nomi-, 
nation by his friends for the city of Edinburgh. 
But he himself ' stood haughtily aloof from the con- 
test, neither issuing an address nor appearing as a 
candidate at the hustings.' His election was never- 
theless secured, and going northward in the autumn, 
he delivered a speech which is said to have done 
much in clearing the way for the Coalition Govern- 
ment which followed, and in support of which he 
subsequently made two orations in the House of 
Commons. In 1853, his Speeches were collected 
and published with his own corrections, and in 1855, 
came out the third and fourth volumes of his His- 
tory. Every lover of English literature will fervently 
pray that he may live long enough to complete that 
vast undertaking ; but no one can with reason expect 



XX11 INTRODUCTION. 

that he will live to complete the one half of it on the 
scale by which it has been began. Meanwhile let him 

but continue to finish and put forth, from time to 
time, such exquisite cabinet-pieces as his four Biog- 
raphies in this volume, and the world will wait more 
patiently while he is filling up his larger canvas with 
the grand historic groups. 

8.C. B. 
Boston, March, 1857. 



NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 



JOSEPH ADDISON. 

Joseph Addison was the eldest son of Dean Addison. 
He was born at his father's rectory of Milston in Wiltshire, 
on the first day of May, 1672. After having passed through 
several schools, the last of which was the Charter-house, he 
went to Oxford, when he was about fifteen years old. He 
was first entered of Queen's College, but after two years 
was elected a scholar of Magdalen College, having, it is 
said, been recommended by his skill in Latin versification. 
He took his master's degree in 1693, and held a fellowship 
from 1699 to 1711. 

The eleven years extending from 1693, or his twenty- 
first year, to 1704, when he was in his thirty-second, maybe 
set down as the first stage of his life as a man of letters. 
During this period, embracing no profession, and not as yet 
entangled in official business, he was a student, an observer, 
and an author ; and though the literary works which he then 
produced are not those on which his permanent celebrity 
rests, they gained for him in his own day a high reputation. 
He had at first intended to become a clergyman ; but his 
talents having attracted the attention of leading statesmen 
belonging to the Whig party, he was speedily diverted from 

1 (D 



2 NKW BIOGRAPHIES. 

his earlier views by the countenance which these men be- 
stowed on him. His first patron (to whom he 
have been introduced by Congrevc) was Charles Mourn 
afterwards Karl of Halifax, who was himself a dabbler in 
literature, and a protector of literary men ; and he became 
known afterwards to the accomplished and excellent Son 
"While both of them were quite able to estimate justly his 
literary merits, they had regard mainly to the services which 
they believed him capable of rendering to the nation or the 
party ; and accordingly they encouraged him to regulate his 
pursuits with a view to public and official employment 
For a considerable time, however, he was left to his own 
resources, which cannot have been otherwise than scanty. 

His first literary efforts were poetical. In 1 698, a short 
poem of his, addressed to Drydeh, was inserted in the third 
volume of that veteran writer's Miscellanies. The next 
volume of this collection contained his translation, in tolerable 
heroic couplets, of "all Virgil's Fourth Georgic, except the 
Btory of AristSBUS." Two and a half 1- id were 

afterwards attempted ; and to his years of early man] 
belonged also his prose Essay on VirgiV& 
tbrmance which hardly deserved, either for it< style or for 

its critical excellence, the compliment paid it by Dryden, la 
prefixing it to his own translation of the poem. The most 
ambitious of those poetical assay»pieces is the "Account of 
the Greatest English Poets," dated April, 1694, and ad- 
dressed affectionately to Sacheverell, the poet's fellow 
legian, who afterwards became bo notorious in the party 
quarrels of the time. This piece, spirited both in langua 
and in versification, i^ chiefly noticeable ring that 

ignorance of <>ld English poetry which was then uniir ml 
Addison next, in 1695, published one compositi 

celebrating contemporary events, and laudi 

: men, on \\ hich, during the half 
the Revolution, there was wasted so much of good writing 



•JOSEPH ADDISON. 3 

and of fair. poetic ability. His piece, not very meritorious 
even in its own class, was addressed " To the King," and 
commemorates the campaign which was distinguished by 
William's taking of Namnr. Much better than the poem 
itself are the introductory verses to Somers, then lord 
keeper. This production, perhaps intended as a remem- 
brancer to the writer's patrons, did not at once produce any 
obvious effect ; and we are left in considerable uncertainty 
as to the manner in which about this time Addison contrived 
to support himself. He corresponded with Ton'son the 
bookseller about projected works, one of these being a 
Translation of Herodotus. It was probably at some later time 
that, he purposed compiling a Dictionary of the English 
language. In 1699 a considerable collection of his Latin 
verses was published at Oxford, in the " Musce Anglicanee." 
These appear to have interested some foreign scholars ; and 
several of them show curious symptoms of his characteristic 
humor. 

In the same year, his patrons, either having still no office 
to spare for him, or desiring him to gain peculiarly high 
•qualifications for diplomatic or other important business, 
provided for him temporarily by a grant, which, though be- 
stowed on a man of great merit and promise, would not pass 
unquestioned in the present century. He obtained, on the 
recommendation of Lord Somers, a pension of three hundred 
pounds a year, designed (as Addison himself afterwards said 
in a memorial addressed to the crown) to enable him " to 
travel, and otherwise qualify himself to serve His Majesty." 
In the summer of 169,9 he crossed into France, where, chiefly 
for the purpose of learning the language, he remained till 
the end of 1700 ; and after this he spent a year in Italy. 
In Switzerland, on his way home, he was stopped by receiv- 
ing notice that he was to be appointed envoy to Prince Eu- 
gene, then engaged in the war in Italy. But his Whig 
friends were already tottering in their places ; and, in March, 



4 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

1702, the death of King William at once drove them from 
power and put an end to the pension. Indeed, Addison 
serted that he never received but one year's payment of it, 
and that all the other expenses of his travels were defrayed 
by himself. He was able, however, to visit a great part of 
Germany, and did not reach Holland till the spring of 1703. 
His prospects were now sufficiently gloomy ; he entered into 
treaty, oftener than once, for an engagement as a travelling 
tutor ; and the correspondence in one of these negotiations 
has been preserved. Tonson had recommended him as the 
best person to attend in this character the son of the Duke 
of Somerset, commonly called "The Proud." The Duk 
profuse man in matters of pomp, was economical in ques- 
tions of education. He wished Addison to name the salary 
he expected ; this being declined, he announced, with great 
dignity, that he would give a hundred guineas a year : 
Addison accepted the munificent offer, saying, however, that 
he could not find his account in it otherwise than by relying 
on his Grace's future patronage; and his Grace immedi- 
ately intimated that he would look out for some one eke. 
Towards the end of 170,'i Addison returned to England. 

AVorks which he composed during his residence on the 
continent, were the earliot that showed him to have at- 
tained maturity of skill and genius. There i> good ronton 
for believing that his tragedy of OrM, whatever change- it 
may afterwards have Buffered, was in great part written 
while he lived in France, that is, when he was about twenty- 
eight yean Of age. In the winter of 17<>1, amidst the Stop- 
pages and discomforts <>f a journey SCTOSS the Mount (Vnis, 
lie Composed, wholly or partly, hi- Letter /rem l(<th/, which 
i- by tar the hot of hlfl DOemS, if it i< not rather the only 
one among them that at all justifies his claim to the poetical 

character. It contains some tine touches of description, and 
it animated by a noble tone of classical enthusiasm. While 

in Germany, he wrote hlfl DiahgwtMO* Mn1a/s, which, how 



JOSEPH ADDISON. 5 

ever, were not published till after his death. These have 
much liveliness of style, and something of the gay humor 
which the author was afterwards to exhibit more strongly ; 
but they show little either of antiquarian learning or of crit- 
ical ingenuity. In tracing out parallels between passages 
of the Roman poets and figures or scenes which appear in 
ancient sculptures, Addison opened the easy course of in- 
quiry which was afterwards prosecuted by Spence ; and 
this, with the apparatus of spirited metrical translations from 
the classics, gave the work a likeness to his account of his 
travels. This account, entitled Remarks on Several Parts of 
Italy, etc., he sent home for publication before his own 
return. It wants altogether the interest of personal narra- 
tive ; the author hardly ever appears. The task in which 
he chiefly busies himself is that of exhibiting the illustra- 
tions which the writings of the Latin poets, and the antiqui- 
ties and scenery of Italy, mutually give and receive. Many 
of the landscapes are sketched with great loveliness ; and 
there are not a few strokes of arch humor. ■ The statistical 
information is very meagre ; nor are there many observa- 
tions on society ; and politics are no further meddled with 
than to show the moderate liberality of the writer's own 
opinions. 

With the year 1704 begins a second era in Addison's 
life, which extends to the summer of 1710, when his age 
was thirty-eight. This was the first term of his official ca- 
reer ; and though very barren of literary performance, it 
not only raised him from indigence, but settled definitely his 
position as a public man. His correspondence shows that, 
while on the Continent, he had been admitted to confidential 
intimacy by diplomatists and men of rank : immediately on 
his return he was enrolled in the Kitcat Club, and brought 
thus and otherwise into communication with the gentry of 
the Whig party. Although all accounts agree in represent- 
ing him as a shy man, he was at least saved from all risk 

I* 



6 NEW BIOGKAPHTBB. 

of making himself disagreeable in society, by his unassuming 
manners, his extreme caution, and that sedulous desire to 
oblige, which his satirist Pope exaggerated into a positive 
fault. His knowledge and ability were esteemed so highly, 
as to confirm the expectations formerly entertained of his 
usefulness in public business ; and the literary lame already 
acquired soon furnished an occasion for recommending him 
to public employment. Though the Whigs were out of 
office, the administration which succeeded them WM, in all 
its earlier changes, of a complexion so mixed and uncertain, 
that the influence of their leaders was not entirely lost >»ot 
long after Marlborough's great victory at Blenheim, it is 
said that Godolphin, the lord treasurer, expressed to Lord 
Halifax a desire to have the great duke's fame extended by 
a poetical tribute. Halifax seized the opportunity of rec- 
ommending Addison as the fittest man for the duty; stipu- 
lating, we are told, that the service should not be unre- 
warded, and doubtless satisfying the minister, that his pro- 
tege possessed other qualifications for office besides dexterity 
in framing heroic verse. The Campaign^ the poem thus 
written to order, was received with extraordinary applause; 
and it is probably as good as any that ever WM prom; 
by no more worthy inspiration. It has indeed neither the 
fiery spirit which Dryden threw into occasional pieces of the 

sort, nor the exquisite polish that would have been given bv 

Pope, if lie had stooped \o make such uses oi his ffmmm: 

but many of the details are pleasing; and in the fan. 

passage Of the Angel, a- well a- in - iiers. the; 
even something of force and imagination. 

The consideration covenanted tor by th< lends 

was faithfully paid. A vacancy occ u rred by the death of 

another celebrated man, John Locke; and in November, 
1764, AddlSOO Was appointed one of the live coinni 

of appeal in Excise. The dutim of the place mutt hi 

been :is light tor him as they had be,n tor his predeee- 



JOSEPH ADDISON. 7 

for he continued to hold it with all the appointments he 
subsequently received from the same ministry. But there 
is no reason for believing that he was more careless than 
other public servants in his time; and the charge of incom- 
petency as a man of business, which has been brought so 
positively against him, cannot possibly be true as to this first 
period of his official career. Indeed the specific allegations 
refer exclusively to the last years of his life ; and, if he had 
not really shown practical ability in the period now in ques- 
tion, it is not easy to see how he, a man destitute alike of 
wealth, of social or fashionable liveliness, and of family in- 
terest, could have been promoted, for several years, from 
office to office, as he was, till the fall of the administration to 
which he was attached. In 1706, he became one of the 
under-secretaries of state, serving first under Hedges, who 
belonged to the Tory section of the government, and after- 
wards under Lord Sunderland, Marlborough's son-in-law, and 
a zealous follower of Addison's early patron, Somers. The 
work of this office however, like that of the commissionership, 
must often have admitted of performance by deputy. For 
in 1707, the Whigs having become stronger, Lord Halifax 
was sent on a mission to the Elector of Hanover ; and, 
besides taking Vanbrugh the dramatist with him as king-at- 
arms, he selected Addison as his secretary. In 1708, he 
entered parliament, sitting at first for Lostwithiel, but after- 
wards for Malmesbury, which, being six times elected, he 
represented from 1710 till his death. Here unquestionably 
he did fail. What part he may have taken in the details of 
business we are not informed ; but he was always a silent 
member, unless it be true that he once attempted to speak 
and sat down in confusion. In 1709, Lord Wharton, the 
father of the notorious duke, having been named Lord-Lieu- 
tenant of Ireland, Addison became his secretary, receiving 
also an appointment as keeper of records. This event hap- 
pened only about a year and a half before the dismissal of 



8 Ni:w BIOGBAPHIM. 

the ministry ; and the [rish secretary would seem to 1 
transacted the business of his office chiefly in London. But 
there are letters showing him to have made himself ac- 
ceptable to some of the best and most distinguished pen 
in Dublin ; and he escaped without having any quarrel with 
Swift, his acquaintance with whom had -begun some time 
before. In the literary history of Addison, those seven 
years of official service arc almost a blank, till we approach 
their close. He defended the government in an anonymous 
pamphlet on The Present Stale of the War; he united com- 
pliments to the all-powerful Marlborough, with indifferent 
attempts at lyrical poetry in his opera ol and. 

besides furnishing a prologue to Steele's comedy of The 
Tender Husband, he perhaps gave some assistance in the 
composition of the play. Irish administration, however, 
allowed, it would seem, more leisure than might have I 
expected. During the last few months of his tenure of 
office, Addison contributed largely to the Toiler. But his 
entrance on this new field does nearly coincide with the 
beginning of a new section in his history. 

Even the coalition ministry of Godolphin was too whig- 
gish for the taste of Queen Anne; and the tories, the favor- 
ites of the court, gained, both in parliamentary power and 
in popularity out of doors, by a combination of lucky acci- 
dents, dexterous management, and divisions and double- 
dealing among their adversaries. The real failure of the 

prosecution of Addison's old friend, Sachevereli, oompl< 

the ruin of the whigSj and in August, 171<>. an entire r 

lution in the ministry had been completed. The tory admin- 
istration, which succeeded, kept its place till the que< 

death in 1711; and Addison Was thus left to devote four of 

the best years of his life, from his thirty-ninth year to his 
forty-third, to occupations less lucrative than those in which 
his time had recently been frittered away, but much more con- 
ducive to the extension of his own tame, and to the b< 



JOSEPH ADDISON. 9 

English literature. Although our information as to his pecun- 
iary affairs is very scanty, we are entitled to believe that he 
was now independent of literary labor. He speaks, in an 
extant paper, of having had (but lost) property in the West 
Indies; and he is understood to have inherited several 
thousand pounds from a younger brother, who was governor 
of Madras. In 1711, he purchased for ten thousand pounds, 
the estate of Bilton, near Rugby ; the same place which, in 
our own day, became the residence of Mr. Apperley, better 
known by the assumed name of " Nimrod." 

During those four years he produced a few political writ- 
ings. Soon after the fall of the ministry, he contributed 
five numbers to The Whig Examiner, a paper set up in 
opposition to the tory periodical of the same name, which 
was then conducted by the poet, Prior, and afterwards 
became the vehicle of Swift's most vehement invectives 
against the party he had once belonged to. These are cer- 
tainly the most ill-natured of Addison's writings ; but they 
are neither lively nor vigorous. There is more spirit in his 
allegorical pamphlet, The Trial and Conviction of Count 
Tariff. 

But from the autumn of 1710 till the end of 1714, his 
principal employment was the composition of his celebrated 
Periodical Essays. The honor of inventing the plan of 
such compositions, as well as that of first carrying the idea 
into execution, belongs to Richard Steele, who had been a 
schoolfellow of Addison at the Charter-house, continued to 
be on intimate terms with him afterwards, and attached him- 
self with his characteristic ardor to the same political party. 
When, in April, 1709, Steele published the first number of 
the Tatler, Addison was in Dublin, and knew nothing of the 
design. He is said to have detected his friend's authorship 
only by recognizing in one of the early papers, a critical 
remark which he remembered having himself communicated 
to Steele. He began to furnish essays in a few weeks, 



10 VtiSW BIOGRAPHIES. 

assisted occasionally while he held office, and afterwards 
•wrote oftener than Steele himself. He thus contributed in 

all, if his literary executor Belected his contributions cor- 
rectly, more than sixty of the two hundred and seventy- 
essays which the work contains. The Toiler exhibited, in 
more ways than one, .-ymptoms of beiog an experiment. 
The projector, imitating the news-sheets in form, thought it 
prudent to give, in each number, news in addition to the 
essay; and there was a want, both of unity and cornet 
finishing, in the putting together of the literary material*. 
Addison's contribution-, in particular, are in many : 
lively as any thing he ever wrote ; and his style, in its more 
familiar moods at least, had been fully formed before he 
returned from the Continent. But, as compared with his 
later pieces, these are only what the painter's loose studies 
and sketches are to the landscapes which he afterwards con- 
structs out of them. Jn his inventions of incidents and 
characters, one thought after another ia hastily used and 
hastily dismissed, a- if he were putting his own j 

the test, or trying the effect of various kind- of object- on 
his readers; his most ambitious flights, in the shape of alle- 
gories and the like, are -till" and inanimate; and hi- favorite 
field of literary criticism i- touched so slightly, a- to -how 

that he -till wanted confidence in the ta-te and knowledge 
of the public. 

The Tatler was dropped at the beginning of 1711; but 
only to be followed by the Spectator, which was begun on 

the lir.-t day of .March, and appeared « tdaj till 

the bib day of December. 1 7 1 '2. It had then eomp! 

the five hundred and flfty-flve numbers usually collected in 

it- first -e\en Volumes. Addi-on. now in London and 

unemployed, cooperated with Steele constantly from the 

very opening Of the : md the two contributing 

almost equally, Beem together to have written not \ 

much less than !i\e hundred of the papers. Kmbokhiied 



JOSEPH ADDISON. 11 

by the success of their former adventure, they devoted their 
whole space to the essays. They relied, with a confidence 
which the extraordinary popularity of the work fully justi- 
fied, on their power of exciting the interest of a wide audi- 
ence by pictures and reflections drawn from a field which 
embraced the whole compass of ordinary life and ordinary 
knowledge; no kind of practical themes being positively 
excluded except such as were political, and all literary top- 
ics being held admissible, for which it seemed possible to 
command attention from persons of average taste and 
information. A seeming unity was given to the undertak- 
ing, and curiosity and interest awakened on behalf of the 
conductors, by the happy invention of the Spectator's Club, 
in which Steele is believed to have drawn all the characters. 
The figure of Sir Roger de Coverley, however, the best even 
in the opening group, is the only one that was afterwards 
elaborately depicted ; and Addison was the author of all the 
papers in which his oddities and amiabilities are so admira- 
bly delineated. To him, also, the Spectator owed a very 
large share of its highest excellences. His were many, 
and these the most natural and elegant, if not the most 
original, of its humorous sketches of human character and 
social eccentricities, its good-humored satires on ridiculous 
features in manners, and on corrupt symptoms in public 
taste ; these topics, however, making up a department in 
which Steele was fairly on a level with his more famous 
coadjutor. But Steele had neither learning, nor taste, nor 
critical acuteness, sufficient to qualify him for enriching the 
series with such literary disquisitions, as those which Addi- 
son insinuated so often into the lighter matter of his essays, 
and of which he gave an elaborate specimen in his cele- 
brated and agreeable criticism on Paradise Lost. Still 
further beyond the powers of Steele were 'those specula- 
tions on the theory of literature and of the processes of 
thought analogous to it, which, in the essays On the Pleas- 



12 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

tires of the Imagination, Addison prosecuted, not, indeed, 
with mucli of philosophical depth, but with a sagacity and 
comprehensiveness which we shall undervalue much, unless 
we remember how little of philosophy was to be found in 
any critical views previously propounded in England. To 
Addison, further, belong those essays which (most frequently 
introduced in regular alternation in the papers of Saturday) 
rise into the region of moral and religious meditation, and 
tread the elevated ground with a step so graceful as to allure 
the reader irresistibly to follow; sometimes, as in the Walk 
through Westminster Abbey, enlivening solemn thought by 
gentle sportiveness ; sometimes flowing on with an uninter- 
rupted sedateness of didactic eloquence ; and sometimes 
shrouding sacred truths in the veil of ingenious allegory, as 
in the majestic Vision of Jlirza. While, in a word, the 
Spectator, if Addison had not taken part in it. would proba- 
bly have been as lively and humorous as it was, and not less 
popular in its own day, it would have wanted some of its 
strongest claims on the respect of posterity, by being at 
once lower in its moral tone, far less abundant in literary 
knowledge, and much Less vigorous and expanded in think- 
ing. In point of style, again, the two friends resemble 
each other so closely as to be hardly distinguishable, when 
both arc 1 dealing with familial' objects, and writing in a kev 
not rising above that of conversation. But, in the higher 
tones of thought and composition, Addison showed a mas- 
tery of language raising him very decisively, not :il 

Steele only, but above all his contemporaries, [ndeed, it 

may .-af'eiy be .-aid, that no one, in any age of our li 

tore, baa united, so strikingly as he did. the colloquial grata 

and ease Which mark the Btyle of an accomplished gentle- 
man, with the power of .-oaring into a .-train of < \|>i\ ->ion 

noble and eloquently dignified. 
On the oeooation of the Spectator! Steele Bel on foot the 

(i'ltitn/ian, whieli, -tarted in March, 171.'). came to an end in 



JOSEPH ADDISON. 13 

October, with its one hundred and seventy-fifth number. 
To this series Addison gave fifty-three papers, being a very 
frequent writer during the latter half of its progress. None 
of his essays here aim so high as the best of those in the 
Spectator ; but he often exhibits both his cheerful and well- 
balanced humor, and his earnest desire to inculcate sound 
principles of literary judgment. In the last six months of 
the year 1714, the Spectator reached its eighth and last vol- 
ume ; for which Steele appears not to have written at all, 
and Addison to have contributed twenty-four of the eighty 
papers. Most of these form, in the unbroken seriousness 
both of their topics and of their manner, a contrast to the ma- 
jority of his essays in the earlier volumes ; but several of 
them, both in this vein and in one less lofty, are among the 
best known, if not the finest of all his essays. Such are the 
Mountain of Miseries ; the antediluvian novel of Shallum 
and Hilpa ; the Reflections by Moonlight on the Divine Per- 
fections. 

In April, 1713, Addison brought on the stage, very reluc- 
tantly, as we are assured, and can easily believe, his tragedy 
of Cato. Its success was dazzling : but this issue was mainly 
owing to the concern which the politicians took in the exhi- 
bition. The Whigs hailed it as a brilliant manifesto in fa- 
vor of constitutional freedom. The Tories echoed the ap- 
plause, to show themselves enemies of despotism, and pro- 
fessed to find in Julius Caesar a parallel to the formidable 
Marlborough. Even with such extrinsic aids, and the 
advantage derived from the established fame of the author, 
Cato could never have been esteemed a good dramatic work, 
unless in an age in which dramatic power and insight were 
almost extinct. It is poor even in its poetical elements, and 
is redeemed only by the finely solemn tone of its moral 
reflections, and the singular refinement and equable smooth- 
ness of its diction. 

The literary career of Addison might almost be held as 
2 



14 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

closed soon after the death of Queen Anne, which occurred 
in August, 1714, when he had lately completed his forty- 
second year. His own life extended only live years loi _ 
and this closing portion of it offers little that is pleasing or in- 
structive. We see him attaining the summit of* his ambition, 
only to totter for a little and sink into an early grave. We 
are reminded of his more vigorous days by nothing hut a 
few happy inventions interspersed in political pamphlets, 
and the gay fancy of a trifling poem on Kneller's portrait 
of George I. 

The Lord Justices who, previously chosen secretly by the 
Elector of Hanover, assumed the government on the Queen's 
demise, were, as a matter of course, the leading Whigs. 
They appointed Addison to act as their secretary. He next 
held, for a very short time, his former office under the Irish 
Lord-Lieutenant ; and, early in 1715, he was made on< 
the Lords of Trade. In the course of the same year oc- 
curred the first of the only two quarrels with friends, into 
which the prudent, good tempered, and modest Addison i- 
said to hare ever been betrayed. His adversary on this 

Occasion was Tope, who, only three years before, had re- 
ef ived, with an appearance of humble thankfulness, Addi- 
son's friendly remarks on his Etsay on Criticism ; but who, 

though still very young, was already Aery famous, and 

beginning to show incessantly his literary jealousies, and 

bis personal and party hatreds. Several little mi>under- 

Btandinga had paved the way for a breach, when, at the same 
time with the first volume of Pope's Mad, there appeared 
a translation of the firsl hook of the poem, bearing the name 
of Thomas Tickell. Tickell in hi< preface, disclaimed all 
rivalry with Pope, and declared that he wished only to be- 
speak favorable attention for bis contemplated version of the 
0(/i/ssr>/. But the simultaneous publication was awkward j 

and Tickell, though not M good a Versifier a- Tope. w;i- ;i 

dangerous rival, as bail I Greek scholar. Further, 



JOSEPH ADDISON. 15 

he was Addison's under-secretary and confidential friend ; 
and Addison, cautious though he was, does appear to 
have said, quite truly, that Tickell's translation was more 
faithful than the other. Pope's anger could not be re- 
strained. He wrote those famous lines in which he de- 
scribes Addison under the name of Atticus ; and, as if to 
make reconciliation impossible, he not only circulated these 
among his friends, but sent a copy to Addison himself. 
Afterwards, he went so far as to profess a belief that the 
rival translation was really Addison's own. It is pleasant 
to observe that, after the insult had been perpetrated, Addi- 
son was at the pains, in his Freeholder, to express hearty 
approbation of the Iliad of Pope : who, on the contrary, 
after Addison's death, deliberately printed the striking but 
malignant lines in the epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. In 
1715, there was acted, with little success, the comedy of 
The Drummer, or the Haunted House, which, though it ap- 
peared under the name of Steele, was certainly not his, and 
was probably written in whole or chiefly by Addison. It 
contributes very little to his fame. From September 1715, 
to June 1716, he defended the Hanoverian succession, and 
the proceedings of the government in regard to the rebellion, 
in a paper called The Freeholder, which he wrote entirely 
himself, dropping it with the fifty-fifth number. It is much 
better tempered, not less spirited, and much more able in 
thinking, than his Examiner. The finical man of taste does 
indeed show himself to be sometimes weary of discussing 
constitutional questions ; but he aims many enlivening 
thrusts at weak points of social life and manners; and 
the character of the fox-hunting Squire, who is introduced 
as the representative of the Jacobites, is drawn with so much 
humor and force that we regret not being allowed to see 
more of him. 

In August, 1716, when he completed his forty-fourth year, 
Addison married the Countess Dowager of Warwick, a 



16 NEW BIOGRAl'IIIl.S. 

widow of fifteen years' standing. She seems to have for- 
feited her jointure by the marriage, and to have brought her 
husband nothing but the occupancy of the Holland House 
at Kensington. We know hardly any thing positively in 
regard to the affair, or as to the origin or duration of his 
acquaintance with the lady or her family. But the current 
assertion that the courtship was a long one, is very probably 
erroneous. There are better grounds for believing th< 
sertion, transmitted from Addison's own time, thut the mar- 
riage was unhappy. The Countess is said to have b 
proud as well as violent, and to lrave supposed that, in con- 
tracting the alliance, she conferred honor instead of receiv- 
ing it. To the uneasiness caused by domestic discomfort, 
the most friendly critics of Addison's character have attrib- 
uted those habits of intemperance, which are said to have 
grown on him in his later years to such an extent as to have 
broken his health and accelerated his death. His moat re- 
cent biographer, who disbelieves his aliened want of matri- 
monial quiet, has called in question, with much ingenuity, the 
whole story of his sottishness ; and it most at any rati 
allowed, that all the assertions which tend to fix such cha 
on him in the earlier parts of his life, reel on no e\ id 
thai 18 worthy of credit, and are in themselves highly im- 
probable. Sobriety was do! the virtue of the day ; and 
constant frequenting of coffee-houses, which figures 
in the Spectator and elsewhere} and which was really prac- 
tised among literary men as well as Others, cannot ! 
had good effects. Addison, however, really appears to i 
had do genuine relish for this mode of life; and ti 
curious notices, especially in Steele's corresponded • 
having lodgings out of town, to which be retired for study 
and composition. Bui whatever the cause ma; 
his health was shattered before he took thai which was the 
last, and certainly the moat unwise step, in his ascent to po- 
litical power. 



JOSEPH ADDISON. 17 

For a considerable time dissensions had existed in the 
ministry ; and these came to a crisis in April, 1717, when 
those who had been the real chiefs, passed into the ranks of 
opposition. Townshend was dismissed ; and Walpole antici- 
pated dismission by resignation. There was now formed, 
under the leadership of General Stanhope and Lord Sun- 
derland, an administration which, as resting on court influ- 
ence, was nicknamed the " German ministry." Sunderland, 
Addison's former superior, became one of the two principal 
secretaries of state, and Addison himself was appointed as 
the other. His elevation to such a post had been contem- 
plated on the accession of George I., and prevented, we are 
told, by his own refusal ; and it is asserted, on the authority 
of Pope, that his acceptance now was owing only to the in- 
fluence of his wife. Even if there is no ground, as there 
probably is not, for the allegation of Addison's inefficiency in 
the details of business, his unfitness for such an office in such 
circumstances was undeniable and glaring. It was impos- 
sible that a government, whose secretary of state could not 
open his lips in debate, should long face an opposition headed 
by Robert Walpole. The decay of Addison's health, too, 
was going on rapidly; being, we may readily conjecture, 
precipitated by anxiety, if no worse causes were at work. 
Ill health was the reason assigned for retirement, in the 
letter of resignation which he laid before the King in March, 
1718, eleven months after his appointment. He received a 
pension of fifteen hundred pounds a year. 

Not long afterwards, the divisions in the "Whig party 
alienated him from his oldest friend. The Peerage bill, in- 
troduced in February, 1719, was attacked, on behalf of the 
opposition, in a weekly paper, which was called the Plebeian, 
and written by Steele. Addison answered it temperately 
enough in the Old Whig ; provocation from the Plebeian 
brought forth angry retort from the Whig ; Steele charged 
Addison with being so old a whig as to have forgotten his 
2* 



18 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

principles; and Addison sneered at Grub Street, and called 
his friend "little Dickey." How Addison felt after this pain- 
ful quarrel we are not told directly; but the Old Whig was 
excluded from that posthumous collection of his works, for 
which his executor Tickell had received from him authority 
and directions. In that collection was inserted a treatise OB 
the evidences of the faith, entitled Of the Christian Re- 
ligion. Its theological value is very small ; but it i< plraf nt 
to regard it as the last effort of one who, amidst all weak- 
nesses, was a man of real goodness as well as of eminent 
genius. 

The disease under which Addison labored appears to 
have been asthma. It became more violent after his retire- 
ment from office; and was now accompanied by dropsy. 
His death-bed was placid ami resigned, and comforted by 
those religious hopes which he had so often suggested to 
others, and the value of which he is said, in an anecdot 
doubtful authority, to have now inculcated in a parting in- 
terview with his step-son. lie died at Holland House, on 
the 17th day of Jane, 1719, six weeks after having com- 
pleted his forty-seventh year. His body, after lying in state, 

was interred in the Poets' corner of Westminster Abbey. 

The BlOQTaphia BritWlfltca gives an elaborate memoir o{ 
him; particulars are well collected in the article under his 
name in the Biographical Dictionary of the S<><i ( ti/ for the 
diffusion of Useful Knowledge ; and a good many new ma- 
terials, especially letter.-, will be found in The 1 

Addison, by Lucy Aiktn, L84& 



FRANCIS ATTERBURY 



Francis Atterbury, a man who holds a conspicuous 
place in the political, ecclesiastical, and literary history of 
England, was born in the year 1662, at Middleton, in Buck- 
inghamshire, a parish of which his father was rector. 
Francis was educated at Westminster School and carried 
thence to Christ Church a stock of learning which, though 
really scanty, he through life exhibited with such judicious 
ostentation that superficial observers believed his attain- 
ments to be immense. At Oxford, his parts, his taste, his 
bold, contemptuous, and imperious spirit soon made him con- 
spicuous. Here he published at twenty, his first work, a 
translation of the noble poem of Absalom and Ahithopel 
into Latin verse. Neither the style nor the versification of 
the young scholar was that of the Augustan age. In 
English composition he succeeded much better. In 1687 
he distinguished himself among many able men who wrote 
in defence of the Church of England, then persecuted by 
James II., and calumniated by apostates who had for lucre 
quitted her communion. Among these apostates none was 
more active and malignant than Obadiah Walker, who was 
master of University College, and who had set up there, 
under the royal patronage, a press for printing tracts against 
the established religion. In one of these tracts, written ap- 
parently by Walker himself, many aspersions were thrown 

(19) 



20 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

on Martin Luther. Atterbury undertook to defend the 
great Saxon reformer and performed that task in a manner 
singularly characteristic. Whoever examines his reply to 
Walker will be struck by the contrast between the feebleness 
of those parts which are argumentative and defensive, and 
the vigor of those parts which are rhetorical and aggressive. 
The Papists were so much galled by the Barcasms and in- 
vectives of the young polemic, that they raised the cry of 
treason, and accused him of having, by implication, called 
King James a Judas. 

After the Revolution, Atterbury, though bred in the doc- 
trines of non-resistance and passive obedience, readily swore 
fealty to the new government. In no long time he took 
holy orders. He occasionally preached in London with an 
eloquence which raised his reputation, and boob had the 
honor of being appointed one of the royal chaplain-. Bui 
he ordinarily resided at Oxford, where he took an active 
part in academical business, directed the classical studies of 
the undergraduates of his college, and was the chief ad\ 
and assistant of Dean Aldrieh, a divine now elm-fly n •m«-m- 
bered by his catches, hut renowned among his contempo- 
raries as a scholar, a Tory, and a high-church man. It wafl 
the practice, not a very judicious practice, of Aldrieh. to 
employ the most promising youths of his college in editing 
Greek and Latin hocks. Among the studious and well- 
disposed lads who were, unfortunately for iln-in>rlves. in- 
duct d to become teachers of philology when they should 

have been content tO be learners, wa> Charles Boyle, BOB of 

the Earl of Orrery, and nephew of Robert Boyle, the gi 
experimental philosopher. The task assigned to Charles 
Boyle was to prepare a new edition of one of the n 
worthless hook- in existence. It was a fashion among tl 
Greeks and Romans who cultivated rhetoric as an art, 
compose epistles and harangues in the names of eminent 
men. Some of these counterfeits are fabricated with such 



FRANCIS ATTERBURY. 21 

exquisite taste and skill, that it is the highest achievement of 
criticism to distinguish them from originals. Others are so 
feebly and rudely executed that they can hardly impose on 
an intelligent school-boy. The best specimen which has 
come down to us is perhaps the oration for Marcellus, such 
an imitation of Tully's eloquence as Tully would himself 
have read with wonder and delight. The worst specimen is 
perhaps a collection of letters purporting to have been writ- 
ten by that Phalaris who governed Agrigentum more than 
500 years before the Christian Era. The evidence, both 
internal and external, against the genuineness of these letters 
is overwhelming. When, in the fifteenth century, they 
emerged, in company with much that was far more valuable, 
from their obscurity, they were pronounced spurious by 
Politian, the greatest scholar of Italy, and by Erasmus, the 
greatest scholar on our side of the Alps. In truth it would 
be as easy to persuade an educated Englishman, that one of 
Johnson's Ramblers was the work of William Wallace, as 
to persuade a man like Erasmus, that a pedantic exercise, 
composed in the trim and artificial Attic of the time of Julian, 
was a despatch written by a crafty and ferocious Dorian 
who roasted people alive many years before there existed 
a volume of prose in the Greek language. But though 
Christ Church could boast of many good Latinists, of many 
good English writers, and of a greater number of clever 
and fashionable men of the world than belonged to any 
other academic body, there was not then in the college a 
single man capable of distinguishing between the infancy 
and the dotage of Greek literature. So superficial indeed 
was the learning of the rulers of this celebrated society, 
that they were charmed by an essay which Sir William 
Temple published in praise of the ancient writers. It now 
seems strange that even the eminent public services, the de- 
served popularity, and the graceful style of Temple should 
have saved so silly a performance from universal contempt. 



22 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

Of the books which he most vehemently eulogized his eulo- 
gies proved that he knew nothing. In fact, lie could not 
read a line of the language in which they were written. 
Among many other foolish thing-, lie said that the letters of 
Phalaris were the oldest letters and also the best in the 
world. Whatever Temple wrote attracted notice. People 
who had never heard of the Epistles of Phalaris began to 
inquire about them. Aldrich, who knew very little Greek, 
took the word of Temple who knew none, and desired Boyle 
to prepare a new edition of these admirable compositions 
which, having long slept in obscurity, had become on a sud- 
den objects of general interest. 

The edition was prepared with the help of Atterburv. who 
was Boyle's tutor, and of some other members of the al- 
lege. It was an edition such as might be expected from 
people who would stoop to edit Bach a book. The i 
were worthy of the text ; the Latin version worthy of 
the Greek original. The volume would have been forgotten 
in a month, had not a misunderstanding about a manuscript 
arisen between the young editor and the greatest BCD 
that had appeared in Europe since the revival of lei: 
Richard Bent ley. The manuscript was in IVntlev's k 
inXT. Boyle wished it to be collated. A mischief-making 

bookseller informed him that Bentley had refused to tend it, 

which was false, and nl.-o that Bentley had spoken eontempt- 
UOOSly of the letters attributed to Phalaris, and of the critics 

who were taken in by Buch counterfeits, which was perfectly 
true. Boyle, much provoked, paid, in his preface, a bitterly 

ironical compliment to Bentley*fl COUrtesy. 1>< mle\ 

venged himself by a shorl dissertation, in which he proved 

that the epistle* were BpurioilS, and the new edition of them 

worthless i but he treated Boyle personally with civility as 
a young gentleman of great hopes, whose 1<>\<- of learn 

WAS highly commendable, and who deserved to ha\e had 
better instruct 



FRANCIS ATTERBURY. 23 

Few things in literary history are more extraordinary 
than the storm which this little dissertation raised. Bentley 
had treated Boyle with forbearance ; but he had treated 
Christ Church with contempt; and the Christ Churchmen, 
wherever dispersed, were as much attached to their college 
as a Scotchman to his country or a Jesuit to his order. 
Their influence was great. They were dominant at Oxford, 
powerful in the Inns of Court and in the College of Physi- 
cians, conspicuous in Parliament and in the literary and 
fashionable circles of London. Their unanimous cry was, 
that the honor of the college must be vindicated, that the 
insolent Cambridge pedant must be put down. Poor Boyle 
was unequal to the task and disinclined to it. It was there- 
fore assigned to his tutor, Atterbury. 

The answer to Bentley, which bears the name of Boyle, 
but which was, in truth, no more the work of Boyle than 
the letters to which the controversy related were the work of 
Phalaris, is now read only by the curious, and will in all 
probability never be printed again. But it had its day of 
noisy popularity. It was to be found not only in the studies 
of men of letters, but on the tables of the most brilliant 
drawing-rooms of Soho Square and Covent Garden. Even 
the beaus and coquettes of that age, the Wildairs and the 
Lady Lure wells, the Mirabels, and the Millamants, con- 
gratulated each other on the way in which the gay young 
gentleman, whose erudition sat so easily upon him, and who 
wrote with so much pleasantry and good breeding about the 
Attic dialect and the anapaestic measure, Sicilian talents and 
Thericlean cups, had bantered the queer prig of a doctor. 
Nor was the applause of the multitude undeserved. The 
book is, indeed, Atterbury's masterpiece, and gives a higher 
notion of his powers than any of those works to which he 
put his name. That he was altogether wrong on the main 
question, and on all the collateral questions springing out of 
it, that his knowledge of the language, the literature, and 



24 raw BIOGRAPHIES. 

the history of Greece, was not equal to what many frssh- 
men now bring up every year to Cambridge and Oxford, 
and that some of his blunder- seem rather to deserve I 

ging than a refutation, is true ; and therefore it is that his 
performance is, in the highest degree, interesting and valu- 
able to the judicious reader. It is good by reason of hs I x- 
ceeding badness. It is the most extraordinary instance that 
exists of the art of making much show with little sub-tance. 
There is no difficulty, says the steward of Moliere's miser. 
in giving a fine dinner with plenty of money : the really 
great cook is he who can set out a banquet with no money 
at all. That Bentley should have written excellently on 
ancient chronology and geography, on the development of 
the Greek language, and the origin of the Greek drama, is 
not strange. But that Atterbury should, during some y< 
have been thought to have treated these subjects much better 
than Bentley, is strange indeed. It is true that the eham- 
pion of Christ Church had all the help which the most cele- 
brated members of that society could give him. Small 
contributed some very good wit ; Friend and otic 
very bad archaeology and philology. But the greater part 
of the volume WSS entirely Atterbury 's ; what was not his 
own was revised and retouched by him ; and the whole 1 < 
the mark of his mind, a mind inexhaustibly rich in all the 
resources of controversy, and familiar with all the artifices 
which make falsehood look like truth, and ignorance like 
knowledge. I le had little gold ; but he beat that little out 
to the very thinnest leaf, and Bpread it over BO VMl a sur- 
face, that to those who judged b\ a glance, and who did not 
resort to balances and tests, the glittering hi rth- 

leSS matter which he produced seemed to be an inestimable 
treasure of massy bullion. Such arguments as he had la- 
placed in the clearest light. Where he had no argu- 
ments, he rasorted to personalities, Bometimei Berious, gen 
erally ludicrous, always olevei and cutting. But whether lie 



FRANCIS ATTERBURY. 25 

was grave or merry, whether he reasoned or sneered, his 
style was always pure, polished, and easy. 

Party spirit then ran high ; yet though Bentley ranked 
among Whigs, and Christ Church was a strong-hold of Tory- 
ism, Whigs joined with Tories in applauding Atterbury's 
volume. Garth insulted Bentley and extolled Boyle in lines 
which are now never quoted except to be laughed at. 
Swift, in his Battle of the Books, introduced with much 
pleasantry Boyle, clad in armor, the gift of all the gods, and 
directed by Apollo in the form of a human friend, for whose 
name a blank is left which may easily be filled up. The 
youth, so accoutred and so assisted, gains an easy victory 
over his uncourteous and boastful antagonist. Bentley, 
meanwhile, was supported by the consciousness of an im- 
measurable superiority, and encouraged by the voices of the 
few who were really competent to judge the combat. " No 
man," he said, justly and nobly, " was ever written down but 
by himself." He spent two years in preparing a reply 
which will never cease to be read and prized while the liter- 
ature of ancient Greece is studied in any part of the world. 
This reply proved not only that the letters ascribed to 
Phalaris were spurious, but that Atterbury, with all his wit, 
his eloquence, his skill in controversial fence, was the most 
audacious pretender that ever wrote about what he did not 
understand. But to Atterbury this exposure was matter of 
indifference. He was now engaged in a dispute about 
matters far more important and exciting than the laws of 
Zaleucus and the laws of Charondas. The rage of relig- 
ious factions was extreme. High-church and low-church 
divided the nation. The great majority of the clergy were 
on the high-church side; the majority of King William's 
bishops were inclined to latitudinarianism. A dispute arose 
between the two parties touching the extent of the powers 
of the Lower House of Convocation. Atterbury eagerly thrust 
himself into the front rank of the high-churchmen. Those 

3 



26 NEW BIOGRAI'III 

who take a comprehensive and impartial view of his whole ca- 
reer, will not be disposed to give him credit for reKgiotB zeal. 
But it was his nature to be vehement and pugnacious in the 
cause of every fraternity of which he was a member. He had 
defended the genuineness of a spurious book simprj 
Christ Church had put forth an edition of that book ; but 
now stood up for the clergy against the civil power, simply 
because he was a clergyman ; and for tin- priests against the 
Episcopal order simply because he-was as yet only a pi 
lie asserted the pretensions of the class to which he be- 
longed in several treatises written with much wit, ingenuity, 
audacity and acrimony. In this, as in his first controv. 
he was opposed to antagonists whose knowledge of the >ub- 
ject in dispute was far superior to his : but in this, as in 
his first controversy, lie imposed on the multitude by bold 
assertion, by sarcasm, by declamation, and, above all. by his 
peculiar knack of exhibiting a little erudition in Mich a 
manner as to make it look like a great deal. Having p as s ed 
himself off on the world as a greater master of classical learn- 
ing than Bentley, be now passed himself off a- a greater l 
ter of ecclesiastical learning than Wake or Gibson. By the 

gnat body of the ebrgy he was regarded as the ablest and 

most intrepid tribune that had ever defended their rights 

against the oligarchy of prelates. The Lower lb 
cation voted him thanks for his s< the Uuiv< 

Oxford created liini a doctor of divinity ; and BOOH after the 

accession of Anne, while the Tories -till had the chief weigh! in 
tin- government, he was promoted to the deanery of Carl 
Soon after he had obtained this preferment, the Whig 

party rO$6 to a-cendency in the Mate. From that party he 

could expect no favor, six years elapsed before a change 
of fortune took place. At length, in the year I7i<>. the 
prosecution of Sacheverell produced a formidable expfo 
of high-church fanaticism. At such a moment Atterbnry 
could not fail to lie conspicuous. Hi- inordii 



FRANCIS ATTERBURY. 27 

the body to which he belonged, his turbulent and aspiring 
temper, his rare talents for agitation and for controversy- 
were again signally displayed. He bore a chief part in 
framing that artful and eloquent speech which the accused 
divine pronounced at the bar of the Lords, and which pre- 
sents a singular contrast to the absurd and scurrilous sermon 
which had very unwisely been honored with impeachment. 
During the troubled and anxious months which followed the 
trial, Atterbury was among the most active of those pamph- 
leteers who inflamed the nation against the Whig ministry 
and the Whig parliament. When the ministry had been 
changed and the parliament dissolved, rewards were show- 
ered upon him. The Lower House of Convocation elected 
him prolocutor. The Queen appointed him Dean of Christ 
Church on the death of his old friend and patron Aldrich. 
The college would have preferred a gentler ruler. Never- 
theless, the new head was received with every mark of 
honor. A congratulatory oration in Latin was addressed to 
him in the magnificent vestibule of the hall ; and he in 
reply professed the warmest attachment to the venerable 
house in which he had been educated, and paid many gra- 
cious compliments to those over whom he was to preside. 
But it was not in his nature to be a mild or an equitable 
governor. He had left the chapter of Carlisle distracted by 
quarrels. He found Christ Church at peace ; but in three 
months his despotic and contentious temper did at Christ 
Church what it had done at Carlisle. He was succeeded in 
both his deaneries by the humane and accomplished Smal- 
ridge, who gently complained of the state in which both had 
been left. " Atterbury goes before and sets every thing on 
fire. I come after him with a bucket of water." It was 
said by Atterbury's enemies that he was made a bishop 
because he was so bad a dean. Under his administration 
Christ Church was in confusion, scandalous altercations took 
place, opprobrious words were exchanged; and there was 



28 Ni;\v BIOGRAPHIES. 

reason to fear that the great Tory college would be ruined 
by the tyranny of the great Tory doctor. He was 
removed to the bishopric of Rochester, which was then 
always united with the deanery of Westminster. Still 
higher dignities seemed to be before him. For, though 
there were many able men on the episcopal bench, there 
was none who equalled or approached him in parliamentary 
talents. Had his party continued in power, it i- not im- 
probable that he would have been raised to the archbishop- 
ric of Canterbury. The more splendid his prospects, the 
more reason he had to dread the accession of a family which 
was well known to be partial to the Whigs. There is every 
reason to believe that he was one of those politicians who 
hoped that they might be able, during the life of Anne to 
prepare matters in such a way that at her decease there 
might be little difficulty in setting aside the Act of Settle- 
ment and placing the Pretender on the throne. Her sud- 
den death confounded the projects of these conspirators. 
Atterbury, who wanted no kind of courage, implored his 
confederates to proclaim James III., and offered to accom- 
pany the heralds in lawn sleeves Hut he found even the 
bravest soldiers of his party irresolute, and exclaimed, not, 
it is said, without interjections which ill became the mouth 
of a father of the church, that the best of all causes and 
the most precious of all moments had been pusillanimously 
thrOWn away. He acquiesced in what he could not prevent, 
took the oaths to tin' IIoiim- of Ilanowr. and at the corona- 
tion officiated with the outward .-how of seal, and did his 
betl to ingratiate himself with the royal family. But his 

servility was requited with cold contempt. No creator 

BO revengeful a- a proud man who bas humbled himself in 
\ain. Adtterburj became the most factious and pertinacious 

of all the opponents of the government In the House of 
Lords, bis oratory, lucid, pointed, lively, and set off with 
every grace of pronunciation and of gesture, extorted the 



FRANCIS ATTERBURY. 29 

attention and admiration even of a hostile majority. Some 
of the most remarkable protests which appear in the 
journals of the peers were drawn up by him ; and in some 
of the bitterest of those pamphlets which called on the Eng- 
lish to stand up for their country against the aliens who had 
come from beyond the seas to oppress and plunder her, 
critics easily detected his style. When the rebellion of 
1715 broke out, he refused to sign the paper in which the 
bishops of the province of Canterbury declared their attach- 
ment to the Protestant succession. He busied himself in 
electioneering, especially at Westminster, where as dean he 
possessed great influence; and was, indeed, strongly sus- 
pected of having once set on a riotous mob to prevent his 
Whig fellow-citizens from polling. 

After having been long in indirect communication with 
the exiled family, he, in 1717, began to correspond directly 
with the Pretender. The first letter of the correspondence 
is extant. In that letter Atterbury boasts of having, during 
many years past, neglected no opportunity of serving the 
Jacobite cause. " My daily prayer," he says, " is that you 
may have success. May I live to see that day, and live no 
longer than I do what is in my power to forward it." It is 
to be remembered that he who wrote thus was a man bound 
to set to the church of which he was overseer an example 
of strict probity ; that he had repeatedly sworn allegiance 
to the House of Brunswick ; that he had assisted in placing 
the crown on the head of George I., and that he had ab- 
jured James III., " without equivocation or mental reserva- 
tion, on the true faith of a Christian." 

It is agreeable to turn from his public to his private life. 
His turbulent spirit, wearied with faction and treason, now 
and then required repose, and found it in domestic endear- 
ments, and in the society of the most illustrious of the 
living and of the dead. Of his wife little is known : but 
between him and his daughter there was an affection singu- 
3 * 



30 NEW BIOGRAPHERS* 

larly close and tender. The gentleness of his manners 
when lie was in the company of a few friends was moo 
seemed hardly credible to those who knew him only by his 
writings and speeches. The charm of his u .-otter hour " 
has been commemorated by one of those friends in impel* 
ishable verse. Though Atterbury's classical attainments 
were not great, his taste in English literature was excellent; 
and his admiration of genius was so strong that it over- 
powered even his political and religious antipathies. His 
fondness for Milton, the mortal enemy of the Stuarts and 
of the church, was such as to many Tories seemed a crime. 
On the sad night on which Addison was laid in the chapel 
of Henry VII., the Westminster boys remarked that Atter- 
bury read the funeral service with peculiar tenderness and 
solemnity. The favorite companions, however, of the great 
Tory prelate were, as might have been expected, nun whose 
politics had at least a tinge of Toryism. He lived on 
friendly terms with Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay. With 
Prior he had a close intimacy, which some misunderstand- 
ing about public affairs at last dissolved. Pope found in 
Atterbury not only a warm admirer, but a most faithful, 
fearless, and judicious adviser. The poet was a frequent 
guest at the episcopal palace among the elms of Bromley, 

and entertained not the slightest BUSpicion that his host, now 

declining in years, confined to an easy chair by gout, and 
apparently devoted to literature, was deeply concerned in 
criminal and perilous designs against the government 
The spirit of the Jacobites had been cowed by the events 

of 1715. li revised in 17lM. The failure o\' the South 
Bel project, the panic in the money market, the downfall of 

great commercial bouses, the distress from which no part 
of the kingdom was exempt, had produced general discon- 
tent It Beamed not improbable that at such a moment an 
insurrection might be BUCcessfuL An insurrection 
planned. The streets of London were to be barricaded : 



FRANCIS ATTERBURY. 31 

the Tower and the Bank were to be surprised ; King 
George, his family and his chief captains and councillors 
were to be arrested, and King James was to be proclaimed. 
The design became known to the Duke of Orleans, regent 
of France, who was on terms of friendship with the House 
of Hanover. He put the English government on its guard. 
Some of the chief malcontents were committed to prison ; 
and among them was Atterbury. No bishop of the Church 
of England had been taken into custody since that memora- 
ble day when the applauses and prayers" of all London had 
followed the seven bishops to the gate of the Tower. The 
Opposition entertained some hope that it might be possible 
to excite among the people an enthusiasm resembling that 
of their fathers, who rushed into the waters of the Thames to 
implore the blessing of Sancroft. Pictures of the heroic con- 
fessor in his cell were exhibited at the shop windows. Verses 
in his praise were sung about the streets. The restraints by 
which he was prevented from communicating with his accom- 
plices were represented as cruelties worthy of the dungeons 
of the Inquisition. Strong appeals were made to the priest- 
hood. Would they tamely permit so gross an insult to be 
offered to their cloth ? Would they suffer the ablest, the 
most eloquent member of their profession, the man who had 
so often stood up for their rights against the civil power, to 
be treated like the vilest of mankind? There was con- 
siderable excitement ; but it was allayed by a temperate 
and artful letter to the clergy, the work, in all probability, 
of Bishop Gibson, who stood high in the favor of Walpole, 
and shortly after became minister for ecclesiastical affairs. 

Atterbury remained in close confinement during some 
months. He had carried on his correspondence with the 
exiled family so cautiously that the circumstantial proofs of 
his guilt, though sufficient to produce entire moral convic- 
tion, were not sufficient to justify legal conviction. He 
could be reached only by a bill of pains and penalties. 



32 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

Such a bill the Whig party, then decidedly predominant in 
both houses, was quite prepared to support Many hot- 
headed members of thai party were eager to follow the pre- 
cedent which had been set in the case of Sir John Fenwick, 
and to pass an act for cutting off the bishop's head* Car 
dogan, who commanded the army, a brave Boldier, but a 
headstrong politician, is said to have exclaimed, with g 
vehemence: "Fling him to the lions in the Tower." Bat 
the wiser and more humane Walpole was always unwilling 
to shed blood; arid his influence prevailed. When par- 
liament met, the evidence against the bishop was laid be- 
fore committees of both houses. Those committees re- 
ported that his guilt was proved. In the Commons a 
olution, pronouncing him a traitor, was carried by nearly 
two to one. A bill was then introduced which provided that 
he should be deprived of his spiritual dignities, that he 
should be banished for life, and that no British subject 
should hold any intercourse with him except by the ro\al 

permission. 

This bill passed the Commons with little difficulty. Per 
the bishop, though invited to defend himself, chose to re- 
serve his defence lor the assembly of which he was a mem- 
ber. In the Lords tin- contest was -harp. The vounn 
Duke of Wharton, distinguished by his parts, his dissolute* 
ness, and his versatility, spoke for Aiinhurv with great 
effect; and Atterbury's own voice was heard tor the last 
time by that unfriendly audience which had so often lisfc 

to him with mingled aversion and delight. Ho produce-; 

witnesses, nor did those witnesses say much that could be 

of service to him. Anions them W88 Tope. lb 

called t<> prove that, while he was an inmate of the palace at 
Bromley, the bishop's time was completely occupied bj 
erary and domestic matters, and that no leisure was 
plotting) But Pope, who was quite unaccustomed to bj 
in public, losl hi- head, and, a- he afterwards owned, 



FRANCIS ATTERBUKY. 33 

though he had only ten words to say, made two or three 
blunders. 

The bill finally passed the Lords by eighty-three votes to 
forty-three. The bishops, with a single exception, were in 
the majority. Their conduct drew on them a sharp taunt 
from Lord Bathurst, a warm friend of Atterbury and a 
zealous Tory. " The wild Indians" he said, "give no quarter, 
because they believe that they shall inherit the skill and 
prowess of every adversary whom they destroy. Perhaps 
the animosity of the right reverend prelates to their brother, 
may be explained in the same way." Atterbury took leave 
of those whom he loved with a dignity and tenderness 
worthy of a better man. Three fine lines of his favorite 
poet were often in his mouth : — 

" Some natural tears he dropped but wiped them soon : 
The world was all before him, where to choose 
His place of rest, and Providence his guide." 

At parting he presented Pope with a Bible, and said, with 
a disingenuousness of which no man who had studied the 
Bible to much purpose would have been guilty : " If ever 
you learn that I have any dealings with the Pretender, I 
give you leave to say that my punishment is just." Pope, 
at this time, really believed the bishop to be an injured man. 
Arbuthnot seems to have been of the same opinion. Swift, 
a few months later, ridiculed with great bitterness in the 
Voyage to Laputa, the evidence which had satisfied the two 
houses of parliament. Soon, however, the most partial 
friends of the banished prelate ceased to assert his innocence, 
and contented themselves with lamenting and excusing what 
they could not defend. After a short stay at Brussels, 
he had taken up his abode at Paris, and had become the 
leading man among the Jacobite refugees who were as- 
sembled there. He was invited to Rome by the Pretender, 
who there held his mock court under the immediate protec- 



34: M W BIOGBAPHJ 

tion of the Pope. But Atterbury felt that a bishop of the 
Church of England would be Btrangely out of place at the 
Vatican, and declined the invitation. During some months, 
however, he might flatter himself that be stood high in the 
good graces of James. The correspondence between the 
master and the servant was constant. Atterbury's m 
were warmly acknowledged, his advice was respectfully 
ived, and he was, as Bolingbroke had been before him, 
the prime minister of a king without a kingdom. But the 
new Uivorite found, as Bolingbroke had found before him, 
that it was quite as hard to keep the shadow of power under 
a vagrant and mendicant prince as to keep the reality of 
power at Westminster. Though James had neither terri- 
tories nor revenue.-, neither army nor navy, there was more 
faction and more intrigue among his courtier.- than an 
those of hi- successful rival. Atterbury soon perceived 
that his counsels were disregarded, if not distrusted. Hi- 
proud spirit was deeply wounded. He (putted Paris, fixed 
his residence at Montpelier, gave up politics, and devt 
himself entirely to letters. In the sixth year of his exile he 
had so severe an illness, that his daughter, herself in very 
delicate health, determined to run all risks that she might 
see him once more. Having obtained a license from the 
English government, she went by sea to Bordeaux, hut 

landed there in such a state that -lie could travel only by 

boat or in a litter. Her father, in -phe of hi- infirmities, 

Bet out from Montpelier to nie.-t her; and she, with the 
impatience which i- often the ,-ign of approaching death, 

hastened toward- him. Those who were about her in vain 

implored her to travel Blowly. She said that every hour 

was precious, thai she only wished to see her papa and to 
die She mel him at Toulouse, embraced him. received 

from hi- hand the -aer« d bread and wine, and thanked God 
that they had passed one day in each other'- society before 
they parted for ever. She died that night. 



FRANCIS ATTERBTJRY. 35 

It was some time before even the strong mind of Atter- 
bury recovered from this cruel blow. As soon as he was 
himself again, he became eager for action and conflict : for 
grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inac- 
tion, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more rest- 
less. The Pretender, dull and bigoted as he was, had found 
out that he had not acted wisely in parting with one who, 
though a heretic, was, in abilities and accomplishments, the 
foremost man of the Jacobite party. The bishop was 
courted back, and was without much difficulty induced to 
return to Paris and to become once more the phantom min- 
ister of a phantom monarchy. But his long and troubled 
life was drawing to a close. To the last, however, his intel- 
lect retained all its keenness and vigor. He learned, in the 
ninth year of his banishment, that he had been accused by 
Oldmixon, as dishonest and malignant a scribbler as any 
that has been saved from oblivion by the Dunciad, of hav- 
ing, in concert with other Christ Churchmen, garbled Clar- 
endon's History of the Rebellion. The charge, as respected 
Atterbury, had not the slightest foundation ; for he was not 
one of the editors of the History, and never saw it till it 
was printed. He published a short vindication of himself, 
which is a model in its kind, luminous, temperate, and dig- 
nified. A copy of this little work he sent to the Pretender, 
with a letter singularly eloquent and graceful. It was im- 
possible, the old man said, that he should write any thing on 
such a subject, without being reminded of the resemblance 
between his own fate and that of Clarendon. They were the 
only two English subjects that had ever been banished from 
their country, and debarred from all communication with 
their friends by act of parliament. But here the resem- 
blance ended. One of the exiles had been so happy as to 
bear a chief part in the restoration of the Royal house. 
All that the other could now do was to die asserting the 
rights of that house to the last. A few weeks after this let- 



36 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

ter was written Atterbury died. He had just completed 
his seventieth year. 

His body was brought to England, and laid with great 
privacy under the nave of Westminster Abbey. Only 
three mourners followed the coffin. No inscription marks 
the grave. That the epitaph with which Pope honored the 
memory of his friend does not appear on the walls of the 
great national cemetery, is no subject of regret : for nothing 
worse was ever written by Colley Gibber. Those who wish 
for more complete information about Atterbury. may easily 
collect it from his sermons and his controversial writings, 
from the report of the parliamentary proceedings against 
him, which will be found in the State Trials ; from the tive 
volumes of his correspondence, edited by Mr. Nichols, and 
from the first volume of the Stuart papers, edited by Mr. 
Glover. A very indulgent, but a very interesting account 
of the Bishop's political career will be found in Lord 
Million's valuable History of England. 



FRANCIS BACON, 

VISCOUNT ST. ALBANS AND BARON VERULAM. 



This illustrious man was born in London on the twenty- 
second of January, 1561. His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, 
a courtier, a lawyer, and a man of erudition, stood high 
in the favor of Queen Elizabeth, and was lord-keeper 
during twenty years of her reign. Anne, the second wife 
of Sir Nicholas, and the philosopher's mother, was the 
daughter^ of Sir Anthony Cooke, Edward the Sixth's tutor, 
and was herself distinguished among the learned females of 
the time. One of her sisters became the wife of Elizabeth's 
celebrated treasurer, Lord Burleigh. Delicate in health, 
and devoted to sedentary employment, Francis Bacon ex- 
hibited in early boyhood the dawning of those powers whose 
versatility afterwards became not less remarkable than their 
strength. As a child he delighted the queen with his pre- 
cocious gravity and readiness of speech ; and before he had 
completed his twelfth year we see him investigating the 
cause of a singular echo in a conduit, and endeavoring to 
penetrate the mystery of a juggler who performed in his 
father's house. At the age of thirteen he was matriculated 
at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which Whitgift was then 
master ; but his residence at the University lasted scarcely 
three years, and his writings contain many expressions of 
4 (37) 



38 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

dissatisfaction with the current system of academical educa- 
tion. Jn his sixteenth year he was sent abroad, and lived 

for some time at Paris, under the charge of the English am- 
bassador, Sir Ainias Paulett ; after which he visited the 
French provinces, and added to his literary and philosoph- 
ical studies an acquaintance with foreign policy and statis- 
tics, the fruit of which soon appeared in his tract upon the 
state of Europe. In February, 1580, his father died, and 
he immediately returned to England. 

Sir Nicholas left but a scanty fortune ; and his son Fran- 
cis, the youngest of a large family, found himself obliged, in 
his twentieth year, to devise the means of earning a liveli- 
hood. It might have been thought that friends could not 
have been wanting to one who, besides his own acknowledged 
merit, had it in his power to urge the long and honorable 
services of his father, while his uncle was the prime minister 
of the kingdom. Of the patronage which thus seemed to 
be at his command, Bacon attempted to avail himself', desir- 
ing to obtain such a public employment as might enable him 
to unite political activity in some degree witli literary study. 
But his .-nit was received neglectfully by the queen, and 
harshly repulsed by his kinsman. Although all the CM 
of this conduct may not be discoverable, a tew lie at the 
Surface. The lord-keeper had. in the later years of his life, 
lost the royal favor. Burleigh, besides his notorious con- 
tempt for men of letters, had to provide for BOnS of his own, 

to whom their accomplished cousin might have proved a dan- 
gerous rival. Prom the Cecils, indeed, Bacon never derived 
any efficient aid, till lie had forced his way upwards in spite 
of them; and there are evident traces of jealousy and dis- 
like iu the mode in which he Was treated both by tie 

treasurer, and by his Beoond son, Robert. 

Obliged, therefore, to betake himself to the law, Bacon was 
admitted at Gray's [nn, where lie spent several y< 
Bcurely in the study of hi- profession, bui with increasing 



FRANCIS BACON. 39 

practice at the bar. The friendship of his fellow lawyers, 
earned by his amiable disposition and his activity in the 
affairs of the society, bestowed on him offices in his inn of 
court; but his kinsmen were still cold and haughty. Lord 
Burleigh continued to write him letters of reproof; and 
Robert Cecil, already a rising statesman, sneered at specula- 
tive intellects, and insinuated their unfitness for the business 
of life. In 1590, when Bacon was in his thirtieth year, he 
was visited for the first time with court favor, receiving then 
an honorary appointment as queen's counsel extraordinary ; 
and to this was added a grant of the reversion of a clerk- 
ship in the star-chamber, which did not become vacant for 
eighteen years. But the lawyer's heart was not in his task. 
His brilliant professional success, and the awakening friend- 
ship of his relations, merely suggested to him renewed 
attempts to escape from the drudgery of the bar. His 
views are nobly expressed in a letter which he addressed to 
the lord-treasurer the year after his appointment. 1 We 

1 "I was now somewhat ancient; one and thirty years is a great 
deal of sand in the hour-glass. My health, I thank God, I find con- 
firmed, and I do not fear that action shall impair it; because I account 
my ordinary course of study and meditation to be more painful than 
most parts of action are. I eA r er bear a mind, in some middle place 
that I could discharge, to serve her majesty; not as a man born under 
Sol that loveth honor, nor under Jupiter that loveth business, for the 
contemplative planet carrieth me away wholly ; but as a man born un- 
der an excellent sovereign, that deserveth the dedication of all men's 

abilities Again, the meanness of my estate doth somewhat move 

me ; for, though I cannot accuse myself that I am either prodigal or 
slothful, yet my health is not to spend, nor my course to get. Lastly, 
I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate 
civil ends ; for I have taken all knowledge to be my province; and if I could 
purge it of two sorts of rovers — whereof the one with frivolous dispu- 
tations, confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments, 
and auricular traditions and impostures, have committed so many 
spoils, — I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded 
conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries ; the best state 
of that province. This, whether it be curiosity, or vainglory, or 
nature, or (if one take it more favorably) philanthropia, is so fixed 



40 NEW MOGRAFttlSS. 

linger with melancholy pleasure over these abortive efforts 
made by one of the finest and most capacious of intellects 
to extricate itself from that labyrinth of worldly turmoil, in 
which its owner was destined to purchase rank and splendor 
at the expense of moral degradation and final ruin. 

We are henceforth to behold Bacon actively engaged in 
political life, as well as in the duties of his profession. Two 
parties then divided the court, equally remarkable in differ- 
ent ways on account of those who headed them. Burleigh 
was the chief of the queen's old counsellors, on whom, 
amidst all her caprices, she always had the prudence to rely 
for the real business of the state : the young and gay, who 
aspired to be ranked as the personal friends or adorers 
of the withered sovereign of hearts, were led by the high- 
spirited and imprudent Karl of Essex. To the party of this 
nobleman Bacon decidedly attached himself, and soon indeed 
shared with his own elder brother Anthony, the earl's m<>-t 
private confidence. Valuable advisers were they to their ra.-di 
patron, and a valuable servant of the nation did Francis B 
bid fair to become, when, in November, 1592, he entered 
parliament as one of the knights of the shire for Middk - 
His first speech, in February following, contained an urgent 
pleading for improvements in the law ; in another add: 
delivered in Match, lie resisted, with exceeding boldnOE 
well as force of rea-on. the immediate levying of an Unpopu- 
lar Subsidy to which the Hon-e had already OO nS O B 
The young lawyer's exposition oi' unpleasant truth- ■_ 

deep offence to the queen. IIi< uncle and the lord-kei 

were both commissioned to convey to him the a<-uran< ■■ 

In my mind, as it cannot be removed \>«! i/ j/omr fardnlqp 

will not carry me on, I will not <1" :e- Anaxagorns did, who reduced 
himself with contemplation Into voluntary poverty ; but (Ats / will 

({,<, — / trill sill tin infm -itinirr flint I fi.irr, Ottd JMf/CftOM to m e Uu 

quick reosmto, or n,thatshal I bjfdmpmty; and 

.so mm "'" nil ' "»« tome sorry boolrmak- • 

piOWeer Ml that winr of truth, irhir/i . 

Bacon's Works, Vol XII p 6, ". Montagu's edit ) 



FRANCIS BACON. - 41 

the royal displeasure ; and the two humble, nay, crouching 
letters of apology, still extant, in which he entreated those 
ministers to procure his pardon, did not forbode much inde- 
pendence in his subsequent conduct. We do not, indeed, 
hear Bacon named as a champion of popular rights. 

In the year 1594, Sir Edward Coke being made attorney- 
general, the solicitorship became vacant ; -and Bacon's appli- 
cation for the office was strenuously supported by Essex. 
But all efforts were in vain. The powerful kinsmen were 
colder than ever towards one who had chosen another patron. 
The lord-keeper, Puckering, acted in a manner which drew 
on him a spirited rebuke from the candidate. The queen 
hesitated, coquetted, told Essex that his friend, though witty, 
eloquent, and in some branches learned, was a showy lawyer 
rather than a profound one. After a delay of many months 
the place was given to a plodding sergeant, and Bacon's 
generous patron, vexed at the disappointment of his hopes, 
sought to console both him and himself by a gift equally 
munificent and delicate. Bacon received from him an estate 
at Twickenham, worth about eighteen hundred pounds. The 
present, in all likelihood, came very seasonably ; for he ap- 
pears to have been already involved in those pecuniary 
embarrassments from which he was never afterwards com- 
pletely able to extricate himself. He was obliged to sell 
the land which Essex had given him ; two years later he 
was arrested in the street for a debt of three hundred 
pounds; and among the Lord Chancellor Ellesmere's pa- 
pers, recently published, there is a curious acknowledg- 
ment, granted in 1604, for a pledge in security of an ad- 
vance of fifty pounds to him. These reasons offer the only 
apology for the addresses which, about the time of his arrest, 
he paid to a wealthy and shrewish widow, who, fortunately 
for him, preferred his professional brother and personal 
enemy, Sir Edward Coke. In the mean time his legal repu- 
tation continued to increase, and his parliamentary exertions 

4 "* 



42 NKW BIOGBA.PBO& 

were unremitted, thougli altogether free from that independ- 
ence which once characterized them. We thus trace Bacon 
down to his thirty-ninth year, pausing only to remark, that 
two years earlier, that is, in 1597, his celebrated Essays 
were first published. Although merely the skeleton of what 
they afterwards became, these compositions gained high rep- 
utation for their author, not only at home, but al.-o on the 
continent. 

After this, the first step in Bacon's literary career. we 
approach what is the most painful task of his biograph 
dark page of his history, over which no ingenuity ha> i 
been able to throw a veil thick enough to disguise its foul- 
ness. We have seen him the friend, the adviser, the grate- 
ful vassal of Essex ; we are now to behold him deserting 
his benefactor, assisting to destroy him, standing forth in the 
face of the world as his enemy and accuser. The phi 
pher's latest biographer has pronounced his conduct in this 
matter to be honorable and praiseworthy; and to bis y 
we must refer those who are curious to canvass arguments 
of which we ourselves are unable to discover the t. 
Bacon, unfortunately for himself, had lately risen much in 
royal favor, and been greatly trusted and employed. Ac- 
cordingly, in the first stages of Ess i \'- decline, he had to 
act a double part. — now offering to his patron adi 

which were but seldom followed, now sreki; 
pacify the queen's rising displeasure. His natural inclina- 
tion for temporizing, the Buccess which had hitherto attended 

his cautious policy, the honesl wish to serve his generous 
friend, — all these reasons may have concurred in tempting 
him to embark in the dangerous channel. But the sunken 

rocks soon encompassed him. and Bhipwreck was unavoidable. 
Alienation either from Elizabeth or from Essex speedily ap- 
peared to be the necessary result o\' the position into which 
the parti' i Bacon had not the courag 

♦ he nobler part, and place tn'mselfby ihe side of hi- falling 



FRANCIS BACON. 43 

•friend, at the probable expense of all his worldly prospects. 
Suspicion and estrangement soon took the place of affection' 
ate confidence ; and the trust reposed in him by the Queen 
was purchased by the bitter consciousness that Essex re- 
garded him as treacherous and hostile. A more degrading 
task was yet to come. The first trial of the earl, in ref- 
erence to his conduct in Ireland, was determined upon ; 
and Bacon's enemies asserted that he offered himself to act 
as one of the counsel for the prosecution. In that memoir 
in defence of his conduct which he wrote in the next reign, 
and which proves satisfactorily nothing but his own humili- 
ating consciousness of guilt, he states as to this matter what 
was doubtless the truth. It had been resolved that the 
proceedings against the rash earl should not be carried out 
to his destruction, but should only disarm and discourage 
him ; and, a hint being conveyed to Bacon that the Queen 
had not determined whether he should be employed pro- 
fessionally in the affair or not, he thought proper to address 
to her " two or three words of compliment," intimating that 
if she would dispense with his services he would consider it 
as one of her greatest favors, but that otherwise he knew 
his duty, and would not allow any private obligations to 
interfere with what he owed to her majesty. All this was, 
he adds, " a respect no man that had his wits could have 
omitted." Bacon, in short, still wished to serve two masters ; 
but he had now placed himself at the mercy of those from 
whom he had no forbearance to expect. The Queen, 
suspicious and moody, was jealous of his attachment to 
Essex, and bent on compelling him to do her service unre- 
servedly; her advisers, or some of them, were glad to have 
the odium of the earl's destruction shared with them by one 
so distinguished, who had, likewise, been the victim's friend. 
It was intimated that Bacon's services could not be dis- 
pensed with ; but he tells us, (and he probably repeats only 
what his masters tried to make him believe,) that it was 



44 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

resolved his share in the prosecution should be confined to 
matters which could not do his unfortunate patron any 
serious harm. Essex's private censure by the privy-council 
followed; and, while he was committed to custody -at-la 
Bacon incurred, by his appearance against him, an obloquy 
of which his letters show him to have been painfully sen- 
sible. In a few months the earl'.- open rebellion took place,; 
he was seized, and put upon his trial in February. 1601, 
along with Lord Southampton ; and on this occasion, when 
his life was at stake, Bacon again appeared as one of the 
counsel for the prosecution, and delivered a speech of which 
there is extant an imperfect account. The Kangnagi 
harsh, but less so than addresses of the kind used to be in 
those days. The topics are oratorical, and, a< it baa b 
justly remarked, are less calculated for insuring conviction, 
(which indeed was certain.) than for placing the conduc 
the prisoner in an odious light, and hardening the Qu> 
heart against him; and, although it would be rash to j . 
of the real temper of the harangue without knowing more 

of its contents, yet what we possess contains much that 
cannot possibly be explained BO as to do credit to the 
speaker. We know, likewise, how the object of the attack 
received it. At one place Bs86X interrupted his treacherous 
friend, and called upon him to say. a- a witness, whether he 
had not, in their confidential intercourse, admitted the truth 
of those excuses which he now affected to treat as frivolous 

and false. Essex was convicted ; and between his s 
and execution, Bacon admits in hi- exculpatory memoir that 
he made no attempt to save him ; seeing the queen but once, 
a- he Bays, and on that occasion venturing to do noth 
further than pronouncing a tew commonplaces on the I 
Bed uses of mercy. Bui not even here was tin- d' 

end. in which the timid man of the world bad Steeped him- 
self. Thi> act which had COSl Kli own hear: 

much, had also made her unpopular; a defence of the royal 



FRANCIS BACON. 45 

policy in regard to Essex was thought necessary ; and the 
pen that drew it up, under the direction of the Queen's 
advisers, was, we are grieved to find, no other than Bacon's. 
The " Declaration of the Practices and Treasons attempted 
and committed by Robert Earl of Essex " was printed, and 
is extant : " a performance," says a late writer, " in defence 
of which, in the succeeding reign, Bacon had not a word to 
say; a performance abounding in expressions which no 
generous enemy would have employed respecting a man 
who had so dearly expiated his offences." With this humili- 
ating act of service we may consider Bacon's public life 
under Elizabeth as closed. 

The reign of her successor was, from its commencement, 
a more auspicious era for men of letters and philosophy, 
with whom James, amidst all his imbecility and coldheart- 
edness, was not by any means ill fitted to sympathize. 
Bacon's learning was no longer open to sneers and con- 
tempt; his uncle was dead; his hunchback cousin, Robert 
Cecil, who soon became Earl of Salisbury, was kept in 
check by his hereditary prudence ; and Coke, who had 
insulted our philosophic lawyer grossly, as he insulted every 
one who was defenceless and within his reach, was in a few 
years removed to the head of the Court of Common Pleas. 
From the first hour of James's reign, Bacon lost no oppor- 
tunity of recommending himself to favor ; but the first 
mark of it which he received, was one of which he neither 
was nor could have been proud, and which, nevertheless, he 
thought proper to solicit. When the king called upon all 
persons possessing forty pounds a year in land to be 
knighted, or to compound for a dispensation from the honor, 
one effect of this scheme for filling the royal coffers was, 
that three members of Bacon's mess at Gray's Inn ap- 
peared among the new knights. That love of external dis- 
tinctions which was the fatal weakness of his nature, was 
called into play, and the philosopher was disconcerted by 



46 WBW BIOGRAPHIES. 

the titles of his companions, beside whom lie sat untitled. 
At the same time, likewise, he bad, in his own words, 
"found out an alderman's daughter, a handsome maiden, to 
his liking;" and the alderman's daughter was likely to be 
more easily won if her admirer could offer her a showy 
accession of rank. Accordingly. Bacon wrote to hi< cousin 
Cecil, stating his desire to obtain, for these reasons, u this 
divulged and almost prostituted title of knighthood." The 
request was granted, but was immediately followed by 
another. Bacon, heartily ashamed of the company in which 
he was to appear, entreated that lie might be knighted 
alone; " that," as he says, "the manner might be BUCh as 
might grace one, since the matter will not." This petition 
was refused; and, on the day of the coronation, Framis 
Bacon was one of three hundred who received the empty 
honor. Soon afterwards, being forty-two years old. he was 
married to the alderman's daughter, Alice Barnham. who 
brought him a considerable fortune, but seems, in the latter 
part of his life at all events, to have contributed little to 
his domestic happiness. 

These details are in themselves trifles ; but they are 
strange illustrations of the mixed character of one who. 
while thus soliciting honors of which he was half ashamed, 
and eager for public distinctions, which, though more >olid. 
were likewise more dangerous was not only respected ami 
distinguished as a lawyer and a Mate-man. as an OTati 
BCholar, and an author, but was occupied, during his few 

hour- of leisure, in completing the most valuable Bvstem of 
philosophy that had ever been expounded in modem Eu- 
rope. Smaller compositions, Bubmitted to hi.- friends, 

showed from time to time the progress of the great work 
which he had marked out a- the bn-ine-- of hi- life; and 

among these was the treatise on the Adva* 
in;/, published in 1605, in its author'- forty-fifth year. 
Political tract- alternated with these philosophical -pecula- 
tions. 



FRANCIS BACON. 47 

In the mean time his public reputation, and his favor 
with the king- increased and kept pace with each other. In 
parliament he was actively useful in forwarding favorite and 
really good measures of the court, such as the union of 
England and Scotland, and the proposed consolidation of 
the laws of the countries. Nor was he less usefully em- 
ployed in taking a prominent part in the select committee 
of the house upon grievances ; and in his skilful hands, the 
report became all that the rules could have wished, without 
exciting any general feeling against the framers. In 1604, 
he was made king's counsel in ordinary, with a salary of 
forty pounds, to which was added a pension of sixty pounds. 
In 1607, upon Coke's promotion to the bench, Bacon was 
appointed solicitor-general ; and he became attorney-gen- 
eral in 1612. His treatises concerning improvements in 
the law, and the principles of legislation, are more credita- 
ble testimonies to the value of his official services, than some 
others of his acts ; such as the scheme, first tried in the 
session of 1614, for securing majorities in the House of 
Commons by organized corruption, the invention of which 
has been recently traced to him, although in his place in 
parliament he ridiculed those who asserted that such a pro- 
ject had ever been formed. Bacon was likewise officially 
the prosecutor of Oliver St. John, of Owen and Talbot, and 
of the old clergyman, Peacham, who was examined in the 
Tower under torture, the founder of modern philosophy 
being present, and putting the questions. In Peacham's 
case there was even an attempt, actively promoted by 
Bacon, for securing a conviction by previous conference 
with the judges ; a plot which, though at length successful, 
was defeated for a time by the sturdy resistance of Coke, a 
tyrant to his inferiors, but a staunch opponent of encroach- 
ments upon judicial independence. Bacon's last remarkable 
appearance as attorney-general, was in the noted trial of the 
earl and countess of Somerset, and their accomplices, for 



48 NKW UHKiKAl'IIIES. 

the murder of Sir Thomas Overbuy ; aDd, whatever the 
foul secret may have been, which was involved in that 
fiendish intrigue, Bacon's letters to the king leave little 
reason for doubting that he at least was in possession of it. 
His conduct in this matter, however, gained him great and 
deserved credit. 

The fall of Somerset was followed by the rise of the new 
favorite, Yilliers, who had already profited by his intimacy 
with the attorney-general, and by the sound advice- with 
which the cautious statesman endeavored to fortify his youth 
and inexperience. The worthless Buckingham, destined in 
a few years to be the instrument of retribution for Bacon's 
past desertion of Essex, did not for some time forget obliga- 
tions, of which he was probably wise enough to desire ■ 
continuance. In 1G1G, Bacon having been sworn of the 
privy-council, relinquished the bar, but retained his chamber 
practice. In the spring of 1G17, the Lord Chancellor 
Ellesmere resigned the seals, which were immediately deliv- 
ered to Bacon, with the title of lord-keeper. In January of 
the succeeding year, he was made lord high chancellor of 
England, and hi July was raised to the peerage as Baron of 
Yerulam. His higher title of Viscount St. Albans WOJ not 
conferred on him till L621. Without neglecting his political 
duties, he proceeded Eealoosly tO the judicial function- of 
his office, in which arrears of business had accumulated 

through the infirmities of his aged predecessor. "This 
day," wrote lie to Buckingham in June, lt'17, "1 bate 
made even with the business of the kingdom for common 
justice; not one cause unheard; the lawyers drawn dry of 

all the motions they irerc to make; not one petition unan- 
swered. And this, I think, could not be .-aid in OUT 

before. Thus I speak, not out of ostentation, bul out of 
gladness, when 1 have done my duty. I know men think I 
cannot continue, it' I should thus oppress myself with buav 
nets ; but that account i- made. The duties of life 



FRANCIS BACON. 49 

more than life ; and if I die now I shall die before the 
world be weary of me." And the man who wrote in this 
solemn, moral strain, the man whose writings throughout 
are an echo of the same lofty expression of the sense of 
duty, was also the man who, in less than four years after his 
elevation to the seat of justice, was to be hurled from it in 
disgrace, branded as a bribed and dishonest man. " At York 
House," says Mr. Montague, " on the 22d of January, 1G21, 
he celebrated his sixtieth birthday, surrounded by his ad- 
mirers and friends, among whom was Ben Jonson, who 
composed a poem in honor of the day. 

Hail, happy genius of this ancient pile ! 
How comes it all things so about thee smile — 
The fire, the wine, the men — and in the midst 
Thou stand'st, as if some mystery thou didst ? 

" Had the poet been a prophet, he would have described 
the good genius of the mansion not exulting, but dejected, 
humble, and about to depart forever." 

He had now arrived at the conviction that his worship of 
the powers of this world had made it impossible for him to 
consummate the great sacrifice which, during his lifetime, 
he had hoped to lay upon the altar of philosophy. Aged 
sixty years, and immersed in difficult and anxious business, 
he felt that his great Restoration of Science, his Instauratio 
Magna, could not be completed ; and he therefore hastened 
to give to the world an outline of its plan, coupled with a 
filling up of one section of the outline. " I number my 
days," wrote he, " and would have it saved." The Novum 
Organum, the result of this determination, was published in 
October, 1620 ; and the fame which it earned for its author 
throughout Europe, was in- its rising splendor when his fall 
took place. 

The tempest which was soon to overturn the throne was 
already lowering on the horizon ; and its earliest mutterings 

5 



50 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

were heard in the important parliament which met on the 
30th of January, 1G21. With most of the complaints, whose 
investigation the king and Buckingham feared so much, we 
have here little to do: but two gross abuses there were, in 
which the lord chancellor was personally implicated. He had 
passed the infamous patents of monopoly, of which the worst 
were those held by Sir Giiles Mompesson, (Massinger's 
Overreach.) and by Sir Francis Michell, and shared by 
Buckingham's brothers and dependents : and he had allowed 
himself to be influenced in his judicial sentences by recom- 
mendations of the favorite. The first of these faults admit- 
ted of palliation ; the second was susceptible of none ; but 
both were real and heavy offences. Yet neither was made 
an article of charge against Bacon. He was attacked upon 
a different ground. Buckingham, by the advice of his new 
counsellor Williams, then dean of Westminster, abandoned 
the monopolists to their fate, contenting himself with send- 
ing his own brothers out of the country, and with afterwards 
publicly denying that he had any hand in assisting their 
escape. But the storm was not allayed. In March, the 
parliamentary committee appointed to impure into the exist- 
ence of abuses in the courts of ju8tice, reported that a! 
did exist, and that the person against whom they \ 

alleged, was the lord chancellor himself. Two cases \ 

Bpecified, of suitors named Aubrey and Kgerlon. o\' whom 
the one had given the chancellor one hundred pounds, the 
other four hundred pounds, and against whom he had «lc- 

cided, notwithstanding these presents. Two days after this 

report w:i> presented, Lord St. Albans presided in the Boose 

of Lords for the Last time. New accusation^ accumulated 

against him ; and, alarmed in mind, and sick in body, he 

retired from the house, and addressed to the peers a letter. 

praying for a suspension of their opinion, until he should 

ha\e undergone a fair trial. In no long tunc the ohoi 

against him amounted to twenty-three ; and Williams, agora 



FRANCIS BACON. . 51 

called to the councils of Buckingham and his master, advised 
that no risks should be incurred upon his account. A pro- 
rogation of parliament ensued, during which an interview 
took place between the king and the chancellor ; and James, 
instead of encouraging his accused servant in the resolution 
he had expressed of defending himself, recommended " that 
he should submit himself to the House of Peers, and that 
upon his princely word he would restore him again, if they 
in their honors should not be sensible of his merits." On 
the 24th of April there was presented to the Lords, by the 
Prince of Wales, a supplication and submission of the lord 
chancellor, in which the most important passage is the fol- 
lowing : " It resteth, therefore, that, without fig leaves, I do 
ingenuously confess and acknowledge that, having under- 
stood the particulars of the charge, not formally from the 
house, but enough to inform my conscience and memory, I 
find matter sufficient and full, both to move me to desert my 
defence, and to move your lordships to condemn and cen- 
sure me. Neither will I trouble your lordships by singling 
those particulars, which I think may fall off. 

Quid te exempta juvat spinis de pluribus una? 

Neither will I prompt your lordships to observe upon the 
proofs, where they come not home, or the scruples touching 
the credits of the witnesses ; neither will I represent unto 
your lordships how far a defence might, in diverse things, 
extenuate the offence, in respect of the time or manner of 
the gift, or the like circumstances ; but only leave these 
things to spring out of your own noble thoughts, and obser- 
vations of the evidence and examinations themselves, and 
charitably to wind about the particulars of the charge here 
and there, as God shall put it in your minds ; and so submit 
myself wholly to your piety and grace And, there- 
fore, my humble suit to your lordships is, that my penitent 
submission may be my sentence, and the loss of the seal my 



52 K*W BIOGRAPHIES. 

punishment ; and that your lordships will spare any further 
sentenee, but recommend me to his majesty's grace and par- 
don for all that is past." But not even thus was the humili- 
ation complete. The house resolved that the submission 
was not specific, nor unequivocal enough to be satisfactory; 
and that he should he required to furnish categorical an- 
swers to the several articles of charge, which accordingly 
were sent to him, being numbered under twenty-three heads. 
The specific answers which he returned were prefaced and 
followed by these declarations: "Upon advised considera- 
tion of the charge, descending into my own conscience, and 
calling my memory to account, so far as I am able, I do 
plainly and ingenuously confess that I am guilty of corrup- 
tion, and do renounce all defence, and put myself upon the 

grace and mercy of your lordships This declaration 

I have made to your lordships with a sincere mind : humbly 
craving that, if there should be any mi-take, your lordships 
would impute, it to want of memory, and not to any <!• 
of mine to obscure truth, or palliate any thing. For I do 
again confess, that in the points charged upon me, although 
they should be taken as myself have declared them, there is 
a great deal of corruption and neglect, for which I am 
heartily and penitently sorry, and submit myself to the 
judgment, grace, and mercy of the court. — Tor extenua- 
tion, I will nse none, concerning the matters themseh 
only it may please your lord-hip-, out of your nobleness, t" 
cast your «ye- of compassion upon my person and estate. 
I was never noted for an a\aricious man. and the apo.-tle 

saith, thai covetouaness is the root of all evil. I hope abo 

that your lor.Miips do the rather find me in the state of 
grace; tor that, in all these particulars, there are t'.u or 
none that are not almost tWO years old, whereas those that 
have a habit of Corruption do commonly wax WOrBC and 

worse; bo that it hath pleased God to prepare me, by pre- 
cedent degrees of amendment, to my present peniteney. 



FRANCIS BACON. 53 

And for my estate, it is so mean and poor, as my care is 
now chiefly to satisfy my debts." 

This declaration being read, a deputation of the lords was 
appointed to wait on the unfortunate man in the chamber 
where he sat deserted and alone, and to demand whether it 
was his own hand that was subscribed to it. Among them 
was Shakespeare's friend Lord Southampton, who had been 
condemned to death along with Essex. Bacon replied to 
them, " it is my act, my hand, my heart. I beseech your 
lordships be merciful to a broken reed." Again the fallen 
judge prayed the king to intercede for him ; and again the 
king, his haughty son, and their thankless favorite, refused 
to interfere. On the 3d of May, 1621, the lords pronounced 
a sentence which, stamping him at all events with indelible 
disgrace, was terrible even in the punishment which it actu- 
ally inflicted. Bacon, found guilty upon Ms own confession, 
was sentenced to a fine of forty thousand pounds, and to 
confinement in the Tower during the King's pleasure ; he 
was pronounced incapable of public employments and of sit- 
ting in parliament, and prohibited from coming within the 
verge of the court. His judges indeed knew that the harsher 
part of the sentence would not be executed. Accordingly, 
though committed immediately to the Tower, he was re- 
leased after two days' imprisonment ; and the fine was re- 
mitted in the course of the autumn, although it is a fact dis- 
honorable (in the circumstances) to his enemy and succes- 
sor, Bishop Williams, that the pardon was stayed at the seal, 
till the king in person ordered it to be passed. 

From the whole tenor of this afflicting history, it is plain 
that Bacon's memory cannot be cleared from very heavy 
imputations. Indeed, the case against him may be stated, 
if we push it to the utmost, in an alternative form which ad- 
mits of no honorable solution. Convicted of corruption, as 
he was, upon his own confession, we must either believe the 
confession, and pronounce him a corrupt judge, or we must 
5* 



54 NEW BI0GKJJTHIK8. 

disbelieve it, and pronounce him a liar. Most of his biogra- 
phers adopt the former alternative. Mr. Montagu's elabo- 
rate defence IS really founded on something which is not 
very far distant from the latter. And humiliating as either 
supposition is, we have, for our own part, no hesitation in 
believing that the truth lies nearest to that theory which im- 
putes to the unhappy chancellor insincerity and cowardice 
rather then wilful corruption. AVe cannot indeed go >o far 
as his enthusiastic biographer, who insists that the 
charged and confessed, were in themselves, if not quits free 
from moral blame yet palliated, not only by general Hf 
but by intentions strictly honest; — that he was sa c r ifi ced 
by the king and the king's minion, although, if he had stood 
a trial, he could have obtained a full acquittal. This, we 
must venture to think, is a position which, if maintained 
to its whole extent, cannot be even plausibly defended. 
Neither, as we must also believe, is justice done by that other 
view, which has been stated more recently with such force 
and eloquence, that the case WAS oik bribery, g 

and glaring even when compared with the ordinary eOUfM 
of corruption in these times ; a case SO bad. that the court, 
anxious, for their own sakes, to save the culprit, dared not 

to utter a word in extenuation. * 

The fact which possesses the greatest importance for the 
elucidation of this unfortunate Story, i> that which ha- been 
founded on BO elaborately by Mr. Montagu, and lately illus- 
trated further by another writer for a different purpe 
The custom of giving presents was then general, not t<> 
universal in England. It extended much further than the 

fpicea of the French parliament ; for the gilts were not 
fixed in amount, nor, though always expected, were they 

i Montagu'! Life of Bacon, Worka, Vol. XVI. pari I. p.3U 

note. I'.ilui!mr,;l t Revirw, Vol. I.\\ ,!.iv.) 

■ EdUUmrgh Review, No. 1 
Napier.) 



FRANCIS BACON. 55 

recognized as lawful perquisites. The advisers of the crown 
received presents from those who asked for favors : the sover- 
eign received presents from those who approached the 
throne on occasions of pomp and festivity. Both these im- 
proprieties were not only universal but unchallenged. Fur- 
ther, judges received presents; and under certain conditions, 
— when, for instance, the giver had not been, and was not 
likely to be, a suitor in the judge's court, or even when, 
though he had been a suitor, the cause was ended, — this 
dangerous abuse was scarcely less common than the other, 
and scarcely regarded in a more unfavorable light. That it 
was wrong, all men felt ; but we fear there were few indeed, 
who, like Sir Thomas More, refused absolutely to profit by 
it. High as Coke himself stood for honesty, and well as 
he deserved praise for this (almost his only redeeming vir- 
tue), we doubt whether his judicial character could have 
emerged quite untainted from a scrutiny led by common in- 
formers, discarded servants, and disappointed litigants, like 
that to which his unfortunate rival was subjected. Pure 
Bacon was not ; purer than he, several of his contempora- 
ries probably were ; but we believe him to have been merely 
one of the offenders, and very far indeed from being the worst, 
in an age when corruption and profligacy, senatorial, judicial, 
and administrative, were almost at the acme of that excess 
which an indignant nation speedily rose to exterminate and 
avenge. 

A comparison of the charges in detail, and of the evi- 
dence adduced, with Bacon's articulate answers, as to the 
candor of which there is no reason to doubt, would really ex- 
hibit little or nothing which, after fair allowances are made 
for imperfect information and other causes of obscurity, 
would afford a distinct contradiction to the chancellor's 
own solemn averment, made in a letter to the king at an 
early stage of the investigation. " For the briberies and 
gifts wherewith I am charged, when the book of hearts 



5G NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

shall be opened, I hope I shall not be found to have the 
troubled fountain of a corrupt heart, in a depraved habit of 
taking rewards to perfect justice ; howsoever I may be frail, 
and partake of the abuses of the times." While he lay in the 
Tower, he addressed to Buckingham a letter containing 
these expressions : " However I have acknowledged that 
the sentence is just, and for reformation sake fit, I have 
been a trusty, and honest, and Christ-loving friend to your 
lordship, and the justest chancellor that hath been in the 
five changes since my father's time." This last sent' 
indeed, when carefully weighed, will be found to contain 
more of truth than the writer himself perhaps intended. 
A judge not altogether unjust he may have been, if we com- 
pare him with his contemporaries; but he was also a trusty, 
and trusting, and servile friend of the royal favorite, and of 
other men in power. He was a lover of the pomp of the 
world, to an extent highly dangerous for one who had but 
little private fortune, insufficient official remuneration, and 
habits which disqualified him for exercising a stricl superin- 
tendence over the expenses of his household, or the conduct 
of his dependents generally. His emoluments as chancellor 
did not amount to three thousand pounds a year; and, im- 
mediately on his appointment, he bad used vain endea 
to have the office put on a more independent tooting. His 
servants habitually betrayed both him and the suitors; but 
there can he no doubt that, continually embarrassed in cir- 
cumstances, he himself was only too glad t<> receive the 

CUStomaiy gilts when they could he taken with any - 
blance of propriety. A- to his Confession, while we Del* 
it to l>v true in every particular instance, we believe it al-o 

in its general admission o\' corruption : bul we lik< 
li<ve that the general admission ought to have been quali- 
fied by certain references, which would have established the 
truth of the remark made by Bacon in bis hou 
Buffering, thai " they upon whom the wall fell were not the 



FRANCIS BACON. 57 

greatest offenders in Israel." And this, as we conceive it, 
was the danger which the court were so eager to avert, the 
danger which filled the king and Buckingham with such dis- 
may. This was their reason for insisting that Bacon should 
sacrifice his own character, and abandon that line of defence 
which might not improbably have precipitated the revolu- 
tion. Upon this assumption, their conduct throughout is 
intelligible and consistent ; and although one is reluctant to 
believe it, the assumption is not contradicted by any thing 
in the chancellor's character. Lofty as may still have been 
his abstract notions of morality, his practical views were 
darkened and debased by his long servitude to public office 
in a corrupt age., The stain which, as he well knew, the 
sentence of the parliament would affix upon his name, may 
have seemed a light thing to one who was aware how the 
same brand might have been justly imprinted on almost every 
eminent name in the kingdom. And again, neither Bacon 
nor his master, nor those others who were the royal advisers, 
were able to comprehend, in this instance, any more than 
elsewhere, the spirit which had already gone abroad. They 
did not anticipate the severity of the sentence pronounced 
by the House of Lords ; still less did they anticipate (Bacon 
at least did not, nor perhaps did Williams) the universal 
indignation which was aroused by the fact that the highest 
judge in the realm had been displaced for bribery. The court 
gained its immediate purpose, in removing to a subsequent 
time the fatal struggle ; but there soon arrived the fulfil- 
ment of Bacon's prophecy, that the successful attack on him 
would be but an encouragement and strengthening to those 
who aimed at the throne itself. 

After his release from the Tower, Bacon, although 
strangely anxious to continue in London, was obliged to 
retire to his paternal seat in Gorhambury, near St. Albans. 
There he immediately commenced his History of Henry the 
Seventh, a work displaying but too unequivocal proofs of the 



58 XEfW .bio<;kaphiks. 

dejected lassitude which had crept upon liis mind. Early 
next year he offeree! himself unsuccessfully for the Provost- 
shij) of Eton College, and proceeded with othe» literary 
undertakings. These included the completion of the cele- 
brated treatise De Augmentis, an improvement of the 
older work on the Advancement of Learning. This was 
the last philosophical treatise which he published : although 
the few remaining years of his life were incessantly devoted 
to study and composition, and gave birth to th ! mi- 

tiSy the /Sylua Sylvarum, and other works of less run se- 
quence. 

Shortly before the king's death, he remitted the whole of 
the sentence on Bacon, who, however, did not again sit in 
Parliament. His health was already broken j and in De- 
cember of that year, 1G25, he -made his will, in which, 
although his affairs were really in extreme confusion, he 
writes as if he considered himself a wealthy man. In the 
spring of 1626, on his way from Gray's Inn to (iorhambury, 
he exposed himself to a sudden chill, by performing in a 
cottage an experiment which had suggested itself to him, 
regarding the fitness of snow or ice as a substitute tor .-alt 

for preserving dead flesh. Unable to travel home, he was 

carried to the carl o\' Arundel's house at Highgate, where, 
after seven days' illness, he died early in the morning of 
Easter Sunday, the 9th of April, in the sixty-sixth year of 

his Bge. In obedience to his will lie was buried in tin- >ame 
grave with his mother, in St. Michael'.- Church, near St. 
Albans. 

It is sad beyond expression to turn to those reflections 
Which are BUggested by the lite of this great man. bo"W< 

leniently one ma\ be disposed to regard his weaknesses, lie 
who founded the philosophy of modern Europe, — he who 
brought down philosophy from heaven to earth) disentan- 
gling it from airy abstractions, and anchoring it on practical 

truth. — he who aided Bcience alike by his improvements on 



FRANCIS BACON. 59 

its procedure, and his enlarged views of its end and aim, 
indicating observation of individual truths as the only sure 
guide to universal conclusions, and practical utility as the only 
quality which makes such conclusions worth the labor they 
cost, — he who did all this, was destined to furnish, by his 
own pitiable example, a pregnant illustration of the great 
principles which his writings taught; a slave to the world 
and its vanities, he was betrayed by the evil genius whom he 
served. Unable to subject reason, and passion, and imagina- 
tion, to the stern control of the moral sense, he expiated, by 
a life of discomfort and dependence, ending in an old age of 
sorrow and disgrace, the sin of having misapprehended the 
mighty rule, which alone can save the empire of the mind 
from becoming a scene like ancient chaos. 

Bacon's philosophy has been analyzed in other parts of 
this work, 1 and on his literary character we have left our- 
selves no space to enlarge. We can only remark the power- 
ful effect which his singular versatility of talents exercised 
over the dissemination of his scientific views. " The reputa- 
tion which Bacon had acquired from his Essays," says a 
late writer, " a work early translated into various foreign 
languages, — his splended talents as an orator, — and his 
prominent place in public life, — were circumstances strongly 
calculated to attract the curiosity of the learned world to his 
philosophical writings." And these writings in themselves 
partake admirably of the character belonging to their 
author's works of a different class. Philosophy has seldom 
made herself more attractive ; never has she made herself 
equally so in communicating lessons of sterling value. If 
the works of this wonderful man were worthless as reposi- 
tories of scientific thought and knowledge, they would still 
demand reverential study. A masterly eloquence, a union 
of diversified qualities of style in the highest sense of the 

1 Encyclopedia Britannica. 



GO NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

word, distinguished even the earlier among them, and entitled 
those which were produced in the writer's mature years, to 
rank, notwithstanding the faults they share with all prose 
compositions of their time, as monuments nowhere excelled 
in the compass of English literature. 1 

1 Montagu's Life of Bacon, Works, Vol. XVI. parts 1 and 2, 1334. 
Edinburgh Review, Vol. LXV., No. 132, Art. 1. Stewart and Plav- 
fair, in the Preliminary Dissertations to the Encyc. Britan. Napier 
on the Scope and Influence of the Philosophical Writings of Lord 
Bacon ; in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Vol. 
VIII. part 2, 1818. 



JOSEPH BUTLER, 



Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham — one of the most 
profound and original thinkers this or any other country 
every produced — well deserves a place among the dii 
majores of English philosophy ; with Bacon, Newton, and 
Locke. 

The following brief sketch will comprise an outline of his 
life and character, some remarks on the peculiarity of his 
genius, and an estimate of his principal writings. 

He was born at Wantage, in Berkshire, May 18, 1692. 
His father, Thomas Butler, had been a linen-draper in that 
town, but before the birth of Joseph, who was the youngest 
of a family of eight, had relinquished business. He con- 
tinued to reside at Wantage, however, at a house called the 
Priory, which is still shown to the curious visitor. 

Young Butler received his first instructions from the Rev. 
Philip Barton, a clergyman, and master of the grammar- 
school at Wantage. The father, who was a Presbyterian, 
was anxious that his son, who early gave indications of ca- 
pacity, should dedicate himself to the ministry in his own 
communion, and sent him to a Dissenting academy at Glou- 
cester, then kept by Mr. Samuel Jones. " Jones," says Pro- 
fessor Fitzgerald with equal truth and justice, " was a man 
of no mean ability or erudition ; " and adds, with honorable 

6 (61) 



G2 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

liberality, " could number among his scholars many names 
that might confer honor on any university in Christendom.* 1 
He instances among others Jeremiah Jones, the author of 
the excellent work on the Canon ; Seeker, afterwards Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury ; and two of the most learned, acute, 
and candid apologists for Christianity England has produced 
— Nathaniel Lardner and Samuel Chandler. 

The academy was shortly afterwards removed to Tewkes- 
bury. While yet there, Butler first displayed his extraordi- 
nary aptitude for metaphysical speculation in the letters lie 
sent to Clarke on two supposed flaws in the reasoning of the 
recently published a priori demonstrations ; one resj>ecting 
the proof of the Divine omnipresence, and the other res] 
ing the proof of the unity of the "necessarily existent 
Being." It is but just to Clarke to say that his opponent 
subsequently surrendered both objections. Whether the 
capitulation be judged strictly the result of logical necessity, 
will depend on the estimate formed of the value of Clarke's 
proof of the truths in question, — truths which air happily 
capable of being shown to be so. independently of any such 

a priori metaphysical demonstration. In this encounter, 
Butler showed his inodeMy not less than his prowess. Bfi 

was so afraid of being discovered, that he employed his 
friend Seeker to convey his letters to the Gloucester j 

Office, and to bring back the answers. 

About this time be began to entertain doubts of the pro- 
priety of adhering to his father's Presbyterian opinions, and 
consequently, of entering the ministry of that communion { 

doubts which at length terminated in his joining the Church 

of England. His father, seeing all opposition vain, at length 
consented to bis repairing to Oxford, where he was entered 

1 / efixed to Professor Fi!/u r > r:»M'> rcry raluabra 

edition of 1 1 » * * Anatomy, Dublin, lsj'.i. The memoir i* derived chiefly 
(ton Mr. Bertlett'i more copious "Urn;" it is rcrj carefully* 
piled, and i> freqacntly cited in the pr e sent article, 



JOSEPH BUTLER. 63 

as a commoner of Oriel College, March 17, 1714. Here he 
early formed an intimate friendship with Mr. Edward Talbot, 
the second son of Bishop of Durham, a connection to which 
his future advancement was in a great degree owing. 

The exact period at. which Butler took orders is not 
known, but it must have been before 1717, as by that date 
he was occasionally supplying Talbot's living, at Hendred, 
near Wantage. In 1718, at the age of twenty-six, he was 
nominated preacher at the Rolls, on the united recommenda- 
tion of Talbot and Dr. Samuel Clarke. 

At this time the country was in a ferment. What is 
called the " Bangorian Controversy," and which originated 
in a sermon of Bishop Hoadley, " On the Nature of Christ's 
Kingdom," (a discourse supposed to imperil " all ecclesiastical 
authority,") was then raging. One pamphlet which that 
voluminous controversy called forth has been attributed to 
Butler. " The external evidence, however is," as Mr. Fitz- 
gerald judges, " but slight ; and the internal for the negative 
at least equally so." This writer says, " On the whole, I 
feel unable to arrive at any positive decision on the subject." 
Readers curious respecting it may consult Mr. Fitzgerald's 
pages, where they will find a detail of the circumstances 
which led to the publication of the pamphlet, and the evi- 
dence for and against its being attributed to Butler. 

In 1721, Bishop Talbot presented Butler with the living 
of Haughton, near Dorkington, and Seeker, (who had also 
relinquished nonconformity, and after some considerable 
fluctuations in his religious views, had at length entered the 
church,) with that of Haughton-le-Spring. In 1725, the 
same liberal patron transferred Butler to the more lucrative 
benefice of Stanhope. 

He retained his situation of preacher at the Rolls till the 
following year (1726) ; and before quitting it published the 
celebrated Fifteen Sermons delivered there ; among the 
most profound and original discourses which philosophical 



64 NBW BIOGRAPHIES. 

theologian ever gave to the world. As these could have 
been but a portion of those he preached at the Kolls, it has 
often been asked what could have become of the remainder? 
We agree with Mr. Fitzgerald in thinking that the substanee 
of many was afterwards worked into the Analogy. That 
many of them were equally important with the Fifteen 
may be inferred from Butler's declaration in the preface, — 
that the selection of these had been determined by "cireum- 
stances in a great measure accidental." At his death, But- 
ler desired his manuscripts to be destroyed ; this be would 
hardly have done, had he not already rifled their chief 
treasures for his great work. Let us hope so at all events ; 
for it would be provoking to think that discourses of equal 
value with the Fifteen had been wantonly committed to the 
flames. 

After resigning his preachership at the Rolls, he retired to 
Stanhope, and gave himself up to study and the duties of a 
parish priest. All that could be gleaned of his habits and 
mode of life there has been preserved by the present Bishop 
of Exeter, his successor in the living of Stanhope eighty 
years after; and it is little enough. Tradition said that 
u BeetOT Butler rode a black pony, and always rode \ 
fast ; that he was loved and respected by all his parishoir 
that he lived very retired, was very kind, and could not 

resist the importunities of common beggars, wheyknowing 
his infirmity, pursued him so earnestly, as sometimes to drive 

him back into his house as his only escape." The last faet 
die bishop reports doubtful; but Butler's extreme ban 

lenee is not so. 

In all probability, Butler in this seclusion was meditating 

and digesting that ureal work on which hifl fame, and what 

i- better than tame, his usefulness, principally rests, the 
Analogy, "In a similar retirement," aaya Professor Fitz- 
gerald, "The Boclesiastiea] Polity of Hooker, The Intel- 
lectual System of Cudworth, and The Divine Legation of 



JOSEPH BUTLER. 65 

Warburton — records of genius 'which posterity will not 
willingly let die ' — were ripened into maturity." Queen 
Caroline once asked Archbishop Blackburne whether Butler 
was not " dead ? " " No," said he, " but he is buried" It 
was well for posterity that he was thus, for a while, en- 
tombed. 

He remained in this meditative seclusion seven years. At 
the end of this period, his friend Seeker, who thought But- 
ler's health and spirits were failing under excess of solitude 
and study, succeeded in dragging him from his retreat. 
Lord Chancellor Talbot, at Seeker's solicitation, appointed 
him his chaplain, in 1733; and in 1736 a prebendary of 
Rochester. In the same year, Queen Caroline, who thought 
her court derived as much lustre from philosophers and 
divines as from statesmen and courtiers — - who had been the 
delighted spectator of the argumentative contests of Clarke 
and Berkeley, Hoadley and Sherlock — appointed Butler 
clerk of the closet, and commanded his "attendance every 
evening from seven till nine." 

It was in 1736 that the celebrated Analogy was pub- 
lished, and its great merits immediately attracted public at- 
tention. It was perpetually in the hands of his royal pat- 
roness, and passed through several editions before the 
author's death. Its greatest praise is that it has been al- 
most universally read, and never answered. " I am not 
aware," says Mr. Fitzgerald, "that any of those whom it 
would have immediately concerned, have ever attempted a 
regular reply to the Analogy ; but particular parts of it 
have met with answers, and the whole, as a whole, has been 
sometimes unfavorably criticized." Of its merits, and pre- 
cise position in relation " to those whom it immediately con- 
cerns," we shall speak presently. 

Some strange criticisms on its general character in Tho- 
luck's Vermischte Schriften, showing a singular infelicity in 

6* 



GG NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

missing Butler's true " stand-jmnfa" as Tholock's own 

countrymen would say, and rather unreasonably complaining 
of obscurity, considering the quality of German theologico- 
philosophical style in general, are well disposed of by 
Professor Fitzgerald, (pp. 47-50). 

About this time Butler had some correspondence with 
Lord Kaimes, on the Evidences of Natural and Rev 
Religion. Kaimes requested a personal interview, which 
Butler declined in a manner very characteristic of his I 
esty and caution. It was, u on the score of his natural 
diffidence and reserve, his being unaccustomed to oral con- 
troversy, and his fear that the cause of truth might thence 
suffer from the unskilfulness of its advocate." 

Hume was a kinsman of Lord Kaimes, and when pre- 
paring his treatise of Human Nature for the press, wa- rec- 
ommended by Lord Kaimes to gel Butlers judgment on it. 
" Your thoughts and mine." says Hume, "agree with respect 
to Dr. Butler, and I should be glad to be introduced to him." 
The interview, however, never took place, nor was Butler's 
judgment obtained. One cannot help speculating on the 
possible consequences. Would it have made any differei 

In the year 17.')7. Queen Caroline died, but on her death- 
bed recommended her favorite divine to her husband's eare. 

In 1738, Butler was accordingly made Bishop of Bristol, in 
place of Dr. Gooch, who was translated to Norwich. This 
seems to have been a politic stroke of Walpole, "who prob- 
ably thought M says Fitzgerald, "thai the ascetic rector of 

Stanhope was too unworldly a person to ear.- tor the pov- 
erty of his preferment, or perceive the slight which it im- 
plied." In the reply, however, in which Butler expn 
his sense of the honor conferred, he shows that he under- 
stood the position of matters very clearly. The hint he 

L r a\e seems to have had its effect, for in 1710 the King 

nominated him to the vacant Deanj ry pf St. Pauls, wi 



JOSEPH BUTLER. 67 

upon he resigned Stanhope, which he had hitherto held in 
commendam. The revenues of Bristol, the poorest see, did 
not exceed £400. 

A curious anecdote of Butler has been preserved by his 
domestic chaplain, Dr. Tucker, afterwards Dean of Glou- 
cester. He says : " His custom was, when at Bristol, to 
walk for hours in his garden in the darkest night which the 
time of year could afford, and I had frequently the honor to 
attend him. After walking some time, he would stop sud- 
denly and ask the question, ' what security is there against 
the insanity of individuals ? The physicians know of none, 
and as to divines, we have no data, either from Scripture or 
from reason, to go upon in relation to this affair.' ' True, 
my Lord, no man has a lease of his understanding any more 
than of his life ; they are both in the hands of the Sovereign 
Disposer of all things.' He would then take another turn, 
and again stop short : ' Why might not whole communities 
and public bodies be seized with fits of insanity, as well as 
individuals ? ' ' My Lord, I have never considered the case, 
and can give no opinion concerning it.' ' Nothing but this 
principle, that they are liable to insanity, equally at least 
with private persons, can account for the major part of those 
transactions of which we read in history.' I thought little of 
that odd conceit of the bishop at that juncture ; but I own I 
could not avoid thinking of it a great deal since, and ap- 
plying it to many cases." 

In 1747, on the death of Archbishop Potter, it is said that 
the primacy was offered to Butler, who declined it, with the 
remark that "it was too late for him to try to support a 
falling church." If he really said so, it must have been in 
a moment of despondency, to which his constitutional melan- 
choly often disposed him. No such feeling, at all events, 
prevented his accepting the bishopric of Durham in 1750, 
on the death of Dr. Edward Chandler. About the time of 
his promotion to this dignity, he was engaged in a design for 



G8 WBW BI0GRAPHK8. 

consolidating and extending the Church of England in the 
American colonies. With this object he drew up a plan 
marked by his characteristic moderation and liberality; the 
project, however, came to nothing. 

Soon after his translation to the see of Durham, Butler 
delivered and published his charge on the Use and Impor- 
tance of External Religion, which gave rise, in conjunction 
with his erection of a " white marble cross" over the com- 
munion table in his chapel at Bristol, and one or two 
other slight circumstances, to the ridiculous and malignant 
charge of popery; — a charge, as Mr. Fitzgerald observes, 
"destitute of a shadow of positive evidence, and contra- 
dieted by the whole tenor of 1> tiller's character, lit- 
writings." 

The revenues from his see were lavishly expended in the 
support of public and private charities, 1 while his own mode 
of life was most simple and unostentatious. Of the frugality 
of his table, the following aneedote is proof: — " A friend of 
mine, since deceased, told me," says the Rev. John Newton, 
u that when he was a young man. he once dined with the late 
Dr. Butler, at that time Bishop of Durham ; and. though 

the guest was a man of fortune, and the interview by ap- 
pointment, the provision was no more than a joint of meat 
and a pudding. The bishop apologised tor his plain tare, 

by saying, that it waa his way of living; 'that he had long 
been disgusted with the fashionable expense of' tin. 

1 Butler must have been of a naturally munificent as well as benev- 
olent disposition. Be was extremely fond, it appears, of plummy 
<vid building ; a passion not always very prudently indulged, or with- 
out danger, in early days, of involving him in difficulties; from 
which, indeed, on one occasion Becker's intervention saved Me 
s}i<-iit large sums in improving lii^ virions residences. It « ; 
ably in the indulgence of the love >>t' ornamentation to which this 
passion led, that the "marbli :.<l other imprud< 

which were so ridiculously adduced n> Bupport the « harge <»t 
originated. 



JOSEPH BUTLER. 69 

money in entertainments, and was determined that it should 
receive no countenance from his example.'" No prelate 
ever owed less to politics for his elevation, or took less part 
in them. If he was not " wafted to his see of Durham," as 
Horace Walpole ludicrously said, " on a cloud of meta- 
physics," he certainly was not carried there by political in- 
trigue or party manoeuvres. He was never known to 
speak in the House of Peers, though constant in his at- 
tendance there. 

He had not long enjoyed his new dignity before symp- 
toms of decay disclosed themselves. He repaired to Bath 
in 1752, in hope of recovering his health, where he died, 
June 16, in the sixtieth year of his age. 

His face was thin, and pale, but singularly expressive of 
placidity and benevolence. " His white hair," says Hutch- 
inson, 1 "hung gracefully on his shoulders, and his whole 
figure was patriarchal." He was buried in the cathedral of 
Bristol, where two monuments have been erected to his 
memory. They record in suitable inscriptions (one in Latin 
by his chaplain, Dr. Foster, and the other in English by the 
late Dr. Southey) his virtues and genius. Though epi- 
taphs, they speak no more than simple truth. 

A singular anecdote is recorded of his last moments. As 
Mr. Fitzgerald observes, "it wants direct testimony," but is 
in itself neither uninstructive nor incredible, for a dying 
hour has often given strange vividness and intensity to truths 
neither previously unknown nor uninfluential. It is gen- 
erally given thus: — "When Bishop Butler lay on his 
death-bed, he called for his chaplain, and said, ' though I 
have endeavored to avoid sin, and to please God, to the 
utmost of my power ; yet, from the consciousness of per- 
petual infirmities, I am still afraid to die/ 'My Lord,' said 
the chaplain, 'you have forgotten that Jesus Christ is a 

1 History of Durham, vol. I. p. 578 ; cited in Fitzgerald's "Life." 



70 NLW BIOGRAPHIES. 

Saviour.' •' True/ was the answer, ' but how shall I- know 
that he is a Saviour for me?' • My Lord, it is written, him 
that cometh unto me, I will in nowise cast <>ut.' 'True,' 
said the bishop, 'and I am surprised, that though I have 
read that Scripture a thousand times over, I never felt its 
virtue till this moment ; and now I die happy.' '' 

The genius of Butler was almost equally distinguished by 
subtilty and comprehensiveness, though the latter quality 
was perhaps the most characteristic. In his juvenile cor- 
respondence with Clarke — already referred to — he dis- 
plays an acuteness which, as Sir James Mackintosh ob- 
serves, "neither himself nor any other ever surpassed ;" an 
analytic skill, which, in earlier ages, might easily have 
gained him a rank with the most renowned of the schoolmen. 
But in his mature works, though they are everywhere char- 
acterized by subtle thought, he manifests in combination with 
it qualities yet more valuable; — patient comprehensiveness 
in the survey of complex evidence, a profound judgment 
and a mosl judicial calmness in computing it- several ele- 
ment s, and a singular constructive skill in combining the 
material- of argument into a consistent logical fabric. This 
"architectural power" of mind may he wholly or nearly 
Wanting, where the mere analytic faculty may exist in 
much vigor. The latter may even he possessed in vicious 
excess, resulting in little more than the disintegration of the 

subjects presented to its ingenuity. Synthetically to i 

struct the complex unity, when the task i^\' analysis is 
pleted, to assign the reciprocal relations and law of subor- 
dination of its various parts, requires something more. 
Many can take a watch to pieces, who would he sorely 

puzzled t<> put it together again. 

Butler possessed these powers of analysis and synl 
in remarkable equipoise. What i- more, he could not only 

recoinhiue. and present in -yininelrieal harmony, the ele- 
ments of a complex unity when capable o( being subj 



JOSEPH BUTLER. 71 

to an exact previous analysis, — as in his remarkable sketch 
of the Moral Constitution of Man, — but he had a wonder- 
fully keen eye for detecting remote analogies and subtle 
relations where the elements are presented intermingled or 
in isolation, and insusceptible of being presented as a single 
object of contemplation previous to the attempt to combine 
them. This is the case with the celebrated Analogy. In 
the Sermons on Human Nature, he comprehensively sur- 
veys that nature as a system or constitution; and after a 
careful analysis of its principles, affections, and passions, 
views these elements in combination, endeavors to reduce 
each of these to its place, assigns to them their relative 
importance, and deduces from the whole the law of subordi- 
nation, — which he finds in the Moral Supremacy of Con- 
science, as a keystone to the arch — the ruling principle of 
the " Constitution." In the Analogy, he gathers up and 
combines from a wide survey of scattered and disjointed 
facts, those resemblances and relations on which the argu- 
ment is founded, and works them into one of the most 
original and symmetrical logical creations to which human 
genius ever gave birth. The latter task was by far the 
more gigantic of the two. To recur to our previous illus- 
tration, Butler is here like One who puts a watch together 
without having been permitted to take it to pieces — from 
the mere presentation of its disjointed fragments. In the 
former case he resembled the physiologist who has an entire 
animal to study and dissect ; in the latter he -resembled 
Cuvier, constructing out of disjecta membra — a bone scat- 
tered here and there — an organized unity which man had 
never seen except in isolated fragments. 

All Butler's productions — even his briefest — display 
much of this " architectonic " quality of mind ; in all he not 
only evinces a keen analytic power in discerning the " differ- 
ences," (one phase of the philosophic genius, according to 
Bacon, and hardly the brightest,) but a still higher power 



72 NEtW BIOGRAPHIES. 

of detecting the u analogies v and " resemblances of things," 
and thus of showing their relation and subordination. 
These peculiarities make his writings difficult ; but it makes 
them profound, and it gives them singular completely 

It is not difficult to assign the precise sphere in which 
Butler, with eminent gifts for abstract science in general, 
felt most at home. Facts show us, not only that there are 
peculiarities of mental structure which prompt men to the 
pursuit of some of the great objects of thought and specula- 
tion rather than others — peculiarities which circumstances 
may determine and education modify, but which neither 
circumstances nor education can do more than determine or 
modify; but that even in relation to the very same subject 
of speculation, there are minute and specific varies' 
mind, which prompt men to addict themselves rather to 
this part of it than to that. This was the case with Butler. 
Eminently fitted for the prosecution of metaphysical science 
in general, it is always the philosophy of the mora/ nature 
of man to which he most naturally attaches himself, and on 
which he best loves to expatiate. Neither Bacon SOT Pas- 
cal ever revolved more deeply the phenomena oi' OUT moral 
nature, or contemplated its inconsistencies — its intricacies 
— its paradoxes — with a keener glance OT more compre- 
hensive BUrvey; Of drew from such survey reflections more 
original or instructive. As in reading Locke the young 
metaphysician is perpetually startled by the palpable appa- 
rition, in distinct sharply-defined outline, of tacts of con- 
sciousness which he recognizes as having been partiallv and 
dimly present to his mind before — though too fugitive to 
fix, tOO Vague tO receive a name; so in nading Hullcr, he 
is continually BUrprised by the Statement of moral Diets and 
law-, which he then first adequately recognizes as true, ami 
BeOS in distinct Vision face to face. It i- not without : 

that Sir .lam.- Mackintosh says of the Bermons preached at 

the Rolls, "that in them Butler lias taught truths more 



JOSEPH BUTLER. 73 

capable of being exactly distinguished from the doctrines 
of his predecessors, more satisfactorily established by him, 
more comprehensively applied to particulars, more rationally 
connected with each other, and therefore more worthy of the 
name of discovery, than any with which we are acquainted." 

His special predilections for the sphere of speculation we 
have mentioned are strikingly indicated in his choice of the 
ground from which he proposes to survey the questions of 
morals. " There are two ways," says he in the preface to 
his three celebrated sermons on Human Nature, " in which 
the subject of morals may be treated. One begins in- 
quiring into the abstract relations of things ; the other, 
from a matter of fact, namely, what the particular nature 
of man is, its several parts, their economy or constitu- 
tion; from whence it proceeds to determine what course 
of life it is, which is correspondent to this whole nature." 
As might be expected, from the tendencies of his mind, he 
selects the latter course. 

The powers of observation in Butler must have been, in 
spite of his studious life and his remarkable habits of ab- 
straction, not much inferior to his keen faculty of introspec- 
tion, though this last was undoubtedly the main instrument 
by which he traced so profoundly the mysteries of our 
nature. There have doubtless been other men, far less 
profound, who have had a more quick and more vivid per- 
ception of the peculiarities of character which discriminate 
individuals, or small classes of men (evincing, after all, how- 
ever, not so much a knowledge of man as a knowledge of 
men) ; still, the masterly manner in which Butler often 
sketches even these, shows that he must have been a very 
sagacious observer of those phenomena of human nature 
which presented themselves from without, as well as of 
those which revealed themselves from within. In general, 
however, it is the characteristics of man, the generic phe- 
nomena of our nature, in all their complexity and subtilty, 

7 



74 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

that he best loves to investigate and exhibit. The spirit of 
his profound philosophy is meantime worthy both of the 
Christian character and the ample intellect of him who ex- 
cogitated it. It is the very reverse of that of the philo- 
sophical satirist or caricaturist; however severely just the 
foibles, the inconsistencies, the corruptions of our nature, it 
is a philosophy everywhere compassionate, magnanimous, 
and philanthropic. Its tone, indeed, like that of the phi- 
losophy of Pascal (though not shaded with the Bante deep 
melancholy), is entirely modulated by a profound conviction 
of the frailty and ignorance of man, of the little we know 
compared with what is to be known, and of the duty of 
humility, modesty, and caution in relation to all those great 
problems of the universe, which tempt and exercise man's 
ambitious speculations. His constant feeling, amidst the 
beautiful and original reasonings of the Analogy, is iden- 
tical with that of Newton, when, reverting at the close of 
life to his sublime discoveries, he declared that he seemed 
only like a child who had been amusing himself with pick- 
ing up a few shells on the margin of the ocean of universal 
truth, while the infinite still lay unexplored before him. 
In a word, it is the feeling, not only of Pascal and of New- 
ton, but of all the profoundest speculators of our race, whose 
grandest Lesson from all they learned, was the vanishing 
ratio of man's knowledge to man's ignorance. Hence the 
immense value (if only as a discipline) of a careful study 
of Butler's Writings, to every youthful mind. They cannot 
but powerfully tend to check presumption, and teach mod- 
BSty and self-distrust. 

The feebleness of Butler's imagination was singularly 
contrasted with the Mtvsntftve and constructive qualities o( 

hi- intellect, and the facility with which he detected and 
employed "analogies" in the way iA' argument. II 
indeed, aUUOSl unique in this respect. Other philosophic 
minds (BaCOO and Uurke are illustrious example.-), which 



JOSEPH BUTLER. 75 

have possessed similar aptitudes for " analogical " reasoning, 
have usually had quite sufficient of the kindred activity of 
imagination to employ " analogies " for the purpose of poeti- 
cal illustration. If Butler possessed this faculty by nature 
in any tolerable measure, it must (as has been the case with 
some other great thinkers) have been repressed and ab- 
sorbed by his habits of abstraction. His defect in this 
respect is, in some respects, to be regretted, since unques- 
tionably the illustrations which imagination would have sup- 
plied to argument, and the graces it would have imparted to 
style, would have made his writings both more intelligible 
and more attractive. It is said that once, and once only, 
he " courted the muses," having indited a solitary " acrostic 
to a fair cousin " who for the first, and as it seems, the only 
time, inspired him with the tender passion. But, as one of 
his biographers says, we have probably no great reason to 
lament the loss of this fragment of his poetry. 

Butler's composition is almost as destitute of the vivacity 
of wit as of the graces of imagination. Yet is he by no 
means without that dry sort of humor, which often accom- 
panies very vigorous logic, and, indeed, is in some sense 
inseparable from it ; for the neat detection of a sophism, or 
the sudden and unexpected explosion of a fallacy, produces 
much the same effect as wit on those who are capable of 
enjoying close and cogent reasoning. There is also a kind 
of simple, grave, satirical pleasantry, with which he some- 
times states and refutes an objection, by no means without 
its piquancy. 

As to the complaint of obscurity, which has been so often 
charged on Butler's style, it is difficult to see its justice in 
the sense in which it has been usually preferred. He is a 
difficult author, no doubt, but he is so from the close pack- 
ing of his thoughts, and their immense generality and com- 
prehensiveness ; as also from what may be called the breadth 
of his march, and from occasional lateral excursions for the 



76 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

purpose of disposing of some objection which he does not 
formally mention, but which might harass his Hank ; it 
certainly is not from indeterminate language or (ordinarily) 
involved construction. All that is really required in the 
reader, capable of understanding him at all, is to do just 
what he does with lyrical poetry (if we may employ an odd, 
and yet in this one point, not inapt comparison) ; he must 
read sufficiently often to make all the traditions of thought 
familiar, he must let the mind dwell with patience on each 
argument till its entire scope and bearing are properly ap- 
preciated. Nothing certainly is wanting in the method or 
arrangement of the thoughts ; and the diction seems to us 
selected with the utmost care and precision, indeed, 
Professor Fitzgerald justly observes, a collation of the first 
with the subsequent editions of the Analogy (the vari- 
ations are given in Mr. Fitzgerald's edition) will show, by 
the nature of the alterations, what pains Butler bestowed 
on a point on which he is erroneously supposed to have 
been negligent. In subjects so abstruse, and involving 
much generality of expression, the utmost difficulty must 
always be experienced in selecting language which conveys 
neither more nor less than what is intended : and this point 
Butler must have labored immensely : it may be added, suc- 
cessfully, since he has at least produced works which have 
seldom given rise to disputes a- to his meaning. Though 
he may be difficult to be understood, few people complain 
of his being liable to be m minders tood. In short, it may 
be doubted whether an) man of so comprehensive I mind, 
and dealing with such abstract subjects, ever condensed the 
results of twenty year- meditations into BO small a com: 
with SO little obscurity. Xo doubt greater amplification 
would have made him more pleasing, but it may be q 
tioned whether the perusal of his writings would have I 

so useful a discipline : and whether the truths he has deliv- 
ered would have fixed themselves so indelibly as they now 



JOSEPH BUTLER. 77 

generally do in the minds of all who diligently study him. 
It is the result of the very activity of mind his writings 
stimulate and demand. But, at any rate, if precision in the 
use of language, and method and consecutiveness in the 
thoughts, are sufficient to rebut the charge of obscurity, 
Butler is not chargeable with the fault in the ordinary 
sense. We must never forget what Whately in his Rhetoric 
has so well illustrated — that perspicuity is a " relative qual- 
ity." To the intelligent, or those who are willing to take 
sufficient pains to understand, Butler will not seem charge- 
able with obscurity. The diction is plain, downright Saxon- 
English, and the style, however homely, has, as the writer 
just mentioned observes, the great charm of transparent 
simplicity of purpose and unaffected earnestness. 

The immortal Analogy has probably done more to 
silence the objections of infidelity than any other ever 
written from the earliest "apologies" downwards. It not 
only most critically met the spirit of unbelief in the author's 
own day, but is equally adapted to meet that which chiefly 
prevails in all time. In every age some of the principal, 
perhaps the principal, objections to the Christian Revelation, 
have been those which men's preconceptions of the Divine 
character and administration — of what God must be, and 
of what God must do — have suggested against certain facts 
in the sacred history, or certain doctrines it reveals. To 
show the objector then (supposing him to be a theist, as 
nine tenths of all such objectors have been), that the very 
same or similar difficulties are found in the structure of the 
universe and the divine administration of it, is to wrest 
every such weapon completely from his hands, if he be a 
fair reasoner and remains a theist at all. He is bound by 
strict logical obligation either to show that the parallel diffi? 
culties do not exist, or to show how he can solve them, 
while he cannot solve those of the Bible. In default qf 
7* 



78 NEW BIOGBAPHIE8. 

doing either of these things, he ought either to renounce all 
such objections to Christianity, or abandon theism altogether. 
It is true, therefore, that though Butler leaves the alterna- 
tive of atheism open, he hardly leaves any other alternative 
to nine tenths of the theists who have objected to Christian- 
ity. 

It has been sometimes said by way of reproach, that 
Butler does leave that door open ; that his work does not 
confute the atheist. The answer is, that it is not its object 
to confute atheism ; but it is equally true, that it docs not 
diminish by one grain any of the arguments against it. 
It leaves the evidence for theism — every particle of it — 
just where it was. Butler merely avails himself of ; 
which exist, undeniably exist (whether men be atheists or 
theists), to neutralize a certain class of objections against 
Christianity. And as the exhibition of such fact- as form 
the pivot on which Butler's argument turns, does not im- 
pugn the truth of theism, but leaves its conclusions, and the 
immense preponderance and convergence of evidence which 
establish them just as they were, so it is equally true that 
Butler has sufficiently guarded his argument from any per- 
version ; for example, in Tart I. chap. VI. ami Tart II. 
Chap. VIII. He has also with his accustomed acuteness and 

judgment shown that, even on the principles of atheism 

itself, its confident assumption that, if its principles be 

granted, a future life — future happiness — future misery — 
hi a dream — cannot be depended on; for since men hawe 
existed, they may again; and it' in a bad condition now 
in a worse hereafter. It is not, on such an hypothesis, a 
whit more unaccountable that man's life should be renewed 
or preserved, or perpetuated forever, than that it should I 

been originated at all. On this point, he truly Bays, "That 
we are to li\e hereafter is JUSt M r. voncilable with the 
scheme of atheism, and as well to be accounted for by 1 .. 



JOSEPH BUTLER. 79 

that we are now alive, is; and therefore nothing can be 
more absurd than to argue from that scheme, that there can 
be no future state." 

It has been also alleged that the analogy only " shifts the 
difficulty from revealed to natural religion," and that " athe- 
ists might make use of the arguments and have done so." 
The answer is, not only (as just said) that the arguments of 
Butler leave every particle of the evidence for theism just 
where it was, and that he has sufficiently guarded against all 
abuse of them ; but that the facts, of which it is so foolishly 
said that the atheist might make ill use, had always been the 
very arguments which he had used, and of which Butler only 
made a new and beneficial application. The objections with 
which he perplexes and baffles the deist, he did not give to the 
atheist's armory ; he took them from thence, merely to make 
an unexpected and more legitimate use of them. The athe- 
ist had never neglected such weapons, nor was likely to do 
so, previous to Butler's adroit application of them. The 
charge is ridiculous ; as well might a man, who had wrested 
a stiletto from an assassin to defend himself, be accused of 
having put the weapon into the assassin's hands ! It was 
there before ; he merely wrested it thence. It is just so 
with Butler. 

Further ; we cannot but think that the conclusiveness of 
Butler's work as against its true object The Deist, has 
often been underrated, by many even of its genuine admir- 
ers; Thus Dr. Chalmers, for instance, who gives such glow- 
ing proofs of his admiration of the work, and expatiates in 
a congenial spirit on its merits, affirms that " those overrate 
the power of analogy who look to it for any very distinct or 
positive contribution to the Christian argument. To repel 
objections, in fact, is the great service which analogy has 
rendered to the cause of Revelation, and it is the only service 
which we seek for at its hands." 1 This, abstractedly, is true ; 

1 Prelections on Butler, etc. p. 7. 



80 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

but, in fact, considering the position of tlie bulk of the ob- 
jectors, that they have been invincibly persuaded of the 
truth of theism, and that their objections to Christianity have 
been exclusively or chiefly of the kind dealt with in the 
Analogy, the work is much more than an argument um ad 
hominem ; it is not simply of negative value. To such ob- 
jectors it logically establishes the truth of Christianity, or it 
forces them to recede from theism, which the bulk will not 
do. If a man says, " I am invincibly persuaded of the truth 
of proposition A, but I cannot receive proposition 1>. be- 
cause objections a, £, y are opposed to it ; if these were 
removed, my objections would cease;" then, if you can show- 
that a., £>, y equally apply to the proposition A, his recep- 
tion of which, he says, is based on invincible evidence, you 
do really compel such a man to believe that not only 15 may 
be true, but that it is true, unless he be willing (which lew 
in the parallel case are) to abandon proposition A a- well as 
B. This is precisely the condition in which the majority of 
deists have ever been, if we may judge from their writings. 
It is usually the a priori assumption, that certain facts in 
the history of the Bible, or some portions of its doctrine, are 
unworthy of the Deity, and incompatible with his character 
or administration, that has chiefly excited the incredulity of 
the deist ; far more than any dissatisfaction with the posi- 
tive evidence which substantiate- the Divine origin of Chris- 
tianity. Neutralize these objections by showing that they 
are 0O1IO% applicable to what he declares he cannot relin- 
quish — the doctrines of theism; and you show liiin. it he 

ha- a particle of logical sagacity, not only that Christianity 

ma) 1"' true, but that it is BO : and hi.- only escape is by 

relapsing into atheism, or resting his opposition on other ob- 
jection- of a \.r\ feeble character in comparison, and which, 
probably, few would have ever been contented with alone; 

for apart from tho-e objections which Butler repels, the 

historical evidence for Christianity the evidence on be» 



JOSEPH BUTLER. 81 

half of the integrity of its records, and the honesty and sin- 
cerity of its founders, showing that they could not hi, ye 
constructed such a system if they would, and woidd not, 
supposing them impostors, if they could — is stronger than 
that for any fact in history. 

In consequence of this position of the argument, Butler's 
boot, to large classes of objectors, though practically an 
argumentum ad hominem, not only proves Christianity may 
be true, but in all logical fairness proves it is so. This he 
himself, with his usual judgment, points out. He says : 
" And objections, which are equally applicable to both nat- 
ural and revealed religion, are, properly speaking, answered 
by its being shown that they are so, provided the former be 
admitted to be true" 

The praise which Mackintosh bestowed on this great 
work, is alike worthy of it and himself. " Butler's great 
work, though only a commentary on the singularly original 
and pregnant passage of Origen, which is so honestly pre- 
fixed to it as a motto, is, notwithstanding, the most original 
and profound work extant in any language, on the Philoso- 
phy of Religion." 1 The favorite topics of the Sermons 
are, of course, largely insisted on in the Analogy ; such 
as the " ignorance of man ; " the restrictions which the lim- 
itations of his nature and his position in the universe should 
impose on his speculations ; his subjection to " probability as 
the guide of life ; " the folly and presumption of pronounc- 
ing, a priori, on the character and conduct of the Divine 
Ruler from our contracted point of view, and our glimpses 
of but a very small segment of his universal plan. These 

topics Butler enforces with a power not less admirable than 

i 

1 A far different and utterly inconsistent judgment in all respects 
is reported, in his " Life," to have fallen from him. But as Professor 
Fitzgerald shows, it is so strangely, and, indeed, amusingly con- 
trary to the above, that it must have been founded on some mistake 
of something that must have been said in conversation. 



82 NEW BI06KAPHIB8. 

the sagacity with which he traces the analogies between the 

" Constitution and Course of Nature," and the di-clo.-u 

" Divine Revelation." These last, of course, form the staple 

of the argument ; but to enforce the proper deductions from 
them, the above favorite topics are absolutely essential. 

It has been sometimes, though erroneously, surmised, that 
Butler was considerably indebted to preceding writers. 
That in the progress of the long deistical controversy many 
theologians should have caught glimpses of the same line of 
argument, is not wonderful. The constant iteration by the 
English deists of that same class of difficulties to which the 
Analogy replies, could not fail to lead to a partial percep- 
tion of the powerful instrument it was reserved tor But- 
ler effectually to wield. It has been here as with almost 
every other great intellectual achievement of man : many 
minds have been simultaneously engaged by the natural 
progress of events alxn/f the same subject of thought : theft 
have been "coming shadows" and "vague anticipations/ 1 
perhaps even simultaneous inventions or disoovi 
then ensues much debate as to the true claimants. Thus it 
was in relation to the calculus, the analysis of water, the in- 
vention of the .-tenm-eugine, and the discovery of Neptune. 

In the present case, however, there can be no doubt that 

the merit of the systematic construction of the entire argu- 
ment rests with Butler. Nor would it have much detracted 
from his merit, even if he had derived tar larger fragments 
of the fabric from his contemporaries than we ha\ 
reason to believe he did. They would ha\e been but 
.-tones; the architectural genius which brought them from 
their distant quarries and polished them, and wrought them 

into a massive evidence, was hi- alone. 

Professor Fitzgerald has truly remarked, that the work of 
\)r. James Foster against Tindal (an author Butl 

dcntlv ha- con-tanth in hi- eye), pr» me curious 

parallelisms with certain passages of the Analogy; we 



< JOSEPH BUTLER. 83 

have ourselves noted in Conybeare's reply to the same infi- 
del writer (published six years before the Analogy), other 
parallelisms not less striking. But it seems quite improba- 
ble that Butler should have derived aid from any such 
sources, since his work was being excogitated for many years 
before it was published ; nay, as we have seen, it may be 
conjectured that he largely transfused into it portions of the 
sermons delivered so long before at the Rolls, and of which 
a far greater number must have been preached than the 
fifteen he published ; so that, perhaps, it is more near the 
truth to say, that contemporary writers had been indebted 
to him than he to them. 

The " pregnant sentence " from Origen, however, is not 
the only thing which may have suggested to Butler his 
great work. Berkeley, in a long passage of the " Minute 
Philosopher," cited by Mr. Fitzgerald, clearly lays down 
the principle on which such a work as the Analogy might 
be constructed. 

The spirit of the Analogy is admirable. Though 
eminently controversial in its origin and purpose ; and 
though the author must constantly have had the deistical 
writers of the day in his eye, his work is calm and dignified, 
and divested of every trace of the controversial spirit. 
He does not even mention the names of the men whose 
opinions he is refuting ; and if their systems had been 
merely some new minerals, or aerolites dropped upon the 
world from some unknown sphere, he could not have ana- 
lyzed them with less of passion. 

Of Butler's ethical philosophy, as expounded especially in 
the Sermons on Human Nature Sir James Mackintosh's 
remarks prefixed to this Encyclopaedia, 1 supersede further 
notice in the present brief article. But it may be remarked 
in general of the sermons preached at the Rolls, that though 

1 Encyclopaedia Britannica. 



84 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

not so much read (if we except, perhaps, the three just 
mentioned) as the Analogy, they are to the full as worthy 
of being read ; they deserve all that is so strikingly said of 
them in the Preliminary Dissertation. Some of them fill 
one with wonder at the sagacity with which the moral para- 
doxes in human nature are investigated and reconciled. 
Take, for example, the sermon on Balaam. The first feel- 
ing in many a mind on reading the history in tin* Old Tes- 
tament is, that man could not so act in the given circum- 
stances. We doubt if ever any man deeply pondered the 
sermon of Butler, in which he dwells on the equally unac- 
countable phenomena of human conduct, less observed, in- 
deed, only because more observable — and questioned any 
longer man's powers of self-deception, even to such feats of 
folly and wickedness as are recorded of the prophet. 

The editions of Butler's writings, separately or altogether. 
have been numerous, and it is impossible within the limits of 
this article to specify them ; still less to do justice to the liter- 
ature which they have produced. His commentators have 
been many and most illustrious; seldom has a man who 
wrote so little, engaged so many great minds to do him 
homage, by becoming his exponents and annotate; 
may be permitted, however, to mention with deserved honor 
the Remarks of Sir , lames Mackintosh prefixed to tin- En- 
cyclopaedia ; the "Prelections" of Dr. Chalmers on the 
Analogy, the valuable "Essay'' of Dr. Hampden on the 
"Philosophical Evidence of Christianity ; " some beautiful 

applications of Butler's principle in Wnately'fl •• Bat 

the Peculiarities of Christianity ; " and the admirable edi- 
tion of the Analogy by Professor FiUgerakl, which is 

enriched by many \erv acute and judicious notes, and by a 
copious and valuable index. 



JOHN HOWARD, 



John Howard, the philanthropist, belongs to the rare 
order of men who have won from the world special titles of 
distinction. Many persons have earned the title of Great, 
from Macedonia's madman to the Swede ; but mankind has 
endowed only one man with the appellative Just. In How- 
ard's case the complimentary addition of the Philanthropist 
is not a mere figure of speech. 

Howard was born at Enfield, (not at Hackney, as the 
monument in St. Paul's asserts,) where his father, a retired 
London merchant, had a country house. He was born on 
the 2d of September, 1726. His father was wealthy, and 
was elected to serve as sheriff; but the Test Act being then 
in force, he paid the fine usually paid by Dissenters to 
escape that honor, a policy which his son afterwards, happily 
for the world, refused to follow. Howard was a sickly 
child, and country air was found necessary to his health. 
He was removed to Cardington, a village in Bedfordshire, 
near to Woburn, where his father had a small estate. The 
facts of his early life are few, and are soon told. He grew 
in years and strength, a quiet, simple, original boy; not 
bright, not vigorous, not ambitious. From his two school- 
masters, the Rev. John Jlorseley, (author of a Latin. Gram- 
mar and translator of a version of the New Testament?) and 
8 ( 85 ) 



86 NBW BIOGRAPHIES. 

Mr. John Eames, F. R. S., be learned but little Latin and 
less Greek ; yet even in his early years he acquired some 
knowledge of living languages, and a fair acquaintance with 
natural science, geography, and medicine. At sixteen, he 
was apprenticed to a grocer in the city, paying seven hun- 
dred pounds as a premium. But his father now died, and 
he was his own master. He therefore bought off his 
apprenticeship, travelled into France and Italy, bought pic- 
tures, visited famous churches and cities, and after an ab- 
sence almost of two years' duration, during which he per- 
fected himself in French, so as to speak the language like a 
native, he returned to England. Here he lodged at Stoke- 
Newington, studied medicine and meteorology, put himself 
on a diet of bread and tea, fell seriously ill. and married his 
nurse, an old woman, who was also a confirmed invalid. 
He was twenty-five, Bhe was about fifty-three. He married 
her because he believed that sin- had saved his life, and 
that no other return for her motherly kindness was sufficient. 
She lived three years as a wife, when her malady wore 
her out, and she was buried in the churchyard of St 
Mary's, AYhitechapel. A plain tomb-lone marks the spot. 
At her death Howard broke up his house. The earthquake 
at Lisbon had just occurred; that earthquake, the effect of 
which on the minds of men Goethe has so powerfully de- 
scribed in his Wahrhrit mid Dichtung. Philanthropic 
impulse was stirred in Howard; be believed thai be could 

help to alleviate the calamity, and he took a berth in the 
u Hanover," Bu( the Seveu Years' War was then raging. 
French, Austrian, and Prussian armies were lighting iii 
various pans of Europe, and English and French cruU 
swept the Beas in every direction. Providence threw the 
k * Hanover" iu the way of a French privateer; she and her 
pa ssengers were carried into Brest. The crew and passen- 
gers were treated with extreme cruelty, wen" hurried from 
place to place, starved, and cast into loathsome dungeo 



JOHN HOWARD. 87 

Howard's heart almost broke with indignation at the treat- 
ment suffered by his gallant and unhappy countrymen. " I 
had evidence," he says, " of their being treated with such 
barbarity that many hundreds had perished, and that thirty- 
six were buried in a hole in Dinan in one day." When he 
obtained his release on parol, he went to the government, 
described in powerful language the scenes he had witnessed, 
and compelled the Commissioners of Sick and Wounded 
Seamen to take measures for securing an exchange of pris- 
oners. A naval officer replaced himself; and in a few days 
he had the satisfaction to hear of the release of his fellow- 
captives in Brittany. 

Howard still retreated from public life. His scientific 
studies were continued, and on May 13, 1756, he was 
elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, to the Transactions 
of which he contributed three papers. Two years later he 
married again. " My second wife was Henrietta Leeds, 
whom a good God gave me the second of May." Such are 
his own words. They lived together in the seclusion of a 
country house for nine years, when their only child, a son, 
was born, and the mother died in the exhaustion of nature. 
Howard's public career began after her death. During her 
life his energies were chiefly confined to the village of Car- 
dington, in which he commenced a reform, then new and 
startling, but which has, since his age, and greatly through 
his example, received a happy development. He was the 
first builder of model cottages. 

When Howard went to reside at Cardington, that village 
was about as filthy, wretched, and unwholesome as any spot 
in England. The neighboring gentry followed the hounds, 
and exacted their rents. The poor were idle, dirty, im- 
moral ; the men passed their days in the ale-house, and 
their nights in the preserves ; the women were ill-used, the 
children ignorant and neglected. Howard's property was 
small in the district compared with that of his neighbors, 



88 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

and before he began his plan, Ire wisely added to his estate 
by two purchases, at once to increase his influence in the 
place, and to obtain a larger field for operations. He then 
built a school for boys and a school for girls, procured good 
teachers, and invited the villagers (not merely his own 
tenants) to send their children, his only conditions being 
regularity, cleanliness, and attendance at some place of wor- 
ship on the Sunday. At the same time he pulled down the 
wretched hovels in which his poorer tenants lived — hovels 
of a single room in which father, mother, and grown up 
children had to eat and sleep — and erected larger and more 
commodious cottages to replace them. With the sure instinct 
of a reformer, he saw that such hovels were not, never 
could be happy homes, — residences in which men with any 
sense of shame, any feeling of self-respect, could live con- 
tentedly while the ale-house offered its cheerful lights and 
jovial company as a change. He therefore undertook to 
remove them. His model cottages were occupied as fast as 
they were raised. They cost more money, yet he did not 
raise the rent; for, in spite of his commercial training, he 
had scruples about putting out money at interest, and looked 
upon wealth as a sacred and moral deposit placed in his 
hands for the benefit oi' mankind, not lor his own private 
use and pleasure. In a tew years some of his rich friends 
and neighbors, especially Samuel Whiihread, (the famous 
brewer, and father of the celebrated politician, YVhitbread.) 
seeing the success of his scheme, lent a hand in the _ 
work. The BChools flourished; the children grew clean and 
rosy ; poaching became rare ; the chapels and churches 
were filled; little patches of garden rose at the COttagC 
door.-; ale-hou>es lost >ome o\' their strong attractions ; and 
CardingtOn began to strike the stranger'- a pretty, 

clean, and prosperous village. 

At'ter his Becond wife's death Howard busied himself with 
his books, his schools, and cottages. He travelled into Hoi- 



JOHN HOWARD. 89 

land. He went to France, to Switzerland, to Italy ; but he 
found no rest for the sole of his foot. He returned as far as 
Holland (his favorite country next to his own), and went 
back thence to Rome and Naples. He admired the Apollo 
and the Gladiator, and he felt the usual raptures before the 
paintings of Titian, Guido, and Raphael. He saw the Pope 
and the Pretender ; the first " a worthy good man ; " the 
second " a mere sot, very stupid, dull, and bending double." 
He went up the mountain to Vesuvius, and down the lagune 
to Venice. He came home through Munich, Augsburg, and 
the Rhine — came home to find himself unexpectedly named 
Sheriff of Bedford, and to begin his public career. This 
was in 1773. He accepted the office of Sheriff, though a 
Dissenter, resolved not to take the usual sacraments, but to 
brave a bad law, and, if prosecuted, defend himself in the 
courts. No one prosecuted him. When the assizes opened 
he sat in the court, and when the trials of the day were 
over he descended into the jail to see in what state the pris- 
oners were. It was the prison into which Bunyan had been 
thrown, and in which he wrote his immortal Pilgrim's Pro- 
gress. Howard found it, like all the jails of the time, 
dirty and close, without decent accommodation for the wo- 
men, and with scarcely any practical separation of the two 
sexes. The air was bad, the food worse, the water intoler- 
able. The fees were high, and rigorously exacted ; the 
iailer and his subordinates living on the wretched wages 
they could wring from the misery of the poor prisoners. 
What most of all astonished his humane heart, and violated 
his sense of right, was the fact that some of the accused 
who had been freed by judge and jury, and who had left 
the court without a stain, were kept in the horrid jail (for 
longer or shorter periods, according to their circumstances, 
but in some cases for years) until they paid the fees of jail 
delivery. Howard instantly brought this monstrous form of 
wrong before the county magistrates, and proposed that an 
8* 



90 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

order should be issued for the discharge of these innocent 
sufferers, and that a rule should be adopted in future for the 
instant liberation in open court of all such persons as were 
found not guilty. The magistrates were startled at such 
bold reforms ; the jailer protested against the loss of his i 
which were his income, his means of life, as he had no salary 
from the county. The clerk of assize put in a similar pro- 
test. Howard proposed to redeem these fees by paying reg- 
ular salaries to these servants of the public; but the magi* 
trates knew of no precedent for such a course, and without 
a precedent they could not act. Howard undertook to find 
it, if such existed in any neighboring county. He went to 
Cambridge, to Huntingdon, to Northampton, to Leicester, 
and to Nottingham, and this journey gradually extended to 
every town in England where was then a prison. The 
object of his search eluded inquiry. He could find no pre- 
cedent for charging the county with the wages of its servants ; 
but he discovered so many abuses in the management of 
prisons which imagination had never conceived, and >o many 
sufferings of which the general public knew nothing, and o^ 
which the law took no account, tjiat he determined to devote 
to the examination of these wrongs, and the reform of these 
abuses, whatever time and money might be needful. The 
ta.-k cost him a fortune, ami the remaining yean of his life. 
The inquiry now attracted public attention. At the elose 
of his first rapid survey of our prisons, the tfoUSfi of Com- 
mons resolved itself into a committee, and heard his report 
at the. bar of the House. Pophain, member tor Taunton, 
had already forced the unwilling legislature to di-cuss the 
propriety of paying {'wed salaries out of the county mi 

but the House had dropped the bill. Howard's revelations 
completed Popham'a arguments. Nearly Wuy years h 
that time the House had appointed a committee to inquire 
into the state of Newgate, the Bfarshalsea, and other London 

jails, when abuSOfl came to light which caused the Hon- 



JOHN HOWARD. 91 

order the arrest of several governors of jails, who were 
tried for high misdemeanors. 1 

But the public, as well as the parliament, shrank from the 
investigation of scenes so horrid, so that after an explosion 
of virtue on the part of Mr. Oglethorpe, magnificently re- 
warded by a couplet in Pope, the subject was allowed to die 
out of recollection until the researches of Howard and the 
zeal of Popham raised it in a more favorable age. When 
the House resumed, Sir Thomas Clavering, at the instance 
of the committee, moved " that John Howard, Esq., be called 
to the bar, and that Mr. Speaker do acquaint him that the 
House are very sensible of the humanity and zeal which 
have led him to visit the several gaols of this kingdom, and 
to communicate to the House the interesting observations 
which he has made upon that subject." This vote put the 
seal of public sanction on his inquiries, so that his subse- 
quent investigations had a sort of semi-official character, of 
vast use to him in dealing with morose jailers and impracti- 
cable magistrates of the very old school. 

From St. Stephen's Howard went to the Marshalsea; 
afterwards to each of the London prisons, which he minutely 
examined. From London he passed to the north of Eng- 
land, whence he was recalled by the passing of two new bills, 
based on Popham's abandoned measure of the previous ses- 
sion and on his own communications to the House. The first 
bill provided for the liberation, free of all charges, of every 
prisoner against whom the grand-jury failed to find a true 
bill, giving the jailer a sum from the county rate in lieu of 
the abolished fees. The second bill required justices of the 
peace to see that the walls and ceilings of all prisons within 
their jurisdiction were scraped and whitewashed once a 
year at least ; that the rooms were regularly cleaned and 
ventilated ; that infirmaries were provided for the sick ; and 

1 Reports of the Committee appointed to inquire into the State of 
the Gaols, 1729. 



92 NKW BIOGRAPHIES. 

proper care taken to get them medical advice; that the 
naked should be clothed ; that underground dungeons should 
be used as little as could be ; and generally that Buch con 
should be taken as would tend to restore and preserve the 
health of the prisoners. That such simple provisions should 
have been denied in Christian England, and in the days of 
Addison and Johnson, is not easy to conceive, after the 
changes of eighty years, brought about through the exer- 
tions of one strong man. Yet the corroborative evidence of 
the state of prisons leaves no room for doubt. Defoe and 
Fielding have both left descriptions of jail life, which, though 
relieved by gross humor, and animated by studies of eccen- 
tric character, are not less revolting than the plain and tragic 
revelations of Howard. Men were callous to Bufferings 
which seemed inevitable to misfortune, as well as to crime. 
Even horrible catastrophes, when they occurred, excited no 
more than a passing interest. The jail distemper always 
raged more or less in the county town, and especially during 
assizes. Judges and juries were sometimes -wept away by 
the awful pest ; 1 and yet no one cared to remove the causes 
of the jail distemper, until the Howard-Popham bill was 
carried on the 2d of June, 177 1. 

It was one thing to have the bill carried in the H0U8C o{ 
Commons; it was another to have it carried into the jails. 
Most of the jailers were ignorant, rapacious fellows: and 
some of them were 'women — a- a rule more ignorant and 
rapacious than the nun. The new law struck at their 

interests, and cordial feeling toward- it was not expected 
from human frailty. Howard resolved to Bee it executed 

with his own e\ es ; he eau-ed the provisions of the act to !><• 
printed at his private COSt, in large type, and he >cnt a copy 
to every jailer and warden in the three kin-don-, BO dial no 
one could be able to plead ignorance of the law. it' del. 

1 Barker's 



JOHN HOWARD. 93 

in the flagrant violation of its provisions. He then recom- 
menced his inspections — travelled into the west of Eng- 
land, into Ireland and Scotland. Beyond the special cause 
to which he had given up his time, he took little interest in 
political matters, though he entertained strong opinions about 
the unjust aggression of the government in America, and 
expressed these opinions in a way to render the possibility 
of his appearance in the House of Commons as an indepen- 
dent member extremely distasteful to ministers. When, 
therefore, an election took place for Bedford, and Howard's 
friends proposed him as a candidate, all the arts of corrup- 
tion were used to keep him out.. He was nevertheless 
elected. On the return being disputed, the election com- 
mittee, which was completely under the minister's hand, 
allowed a number of pauper votes which had been bought up 
and recorded in favor of the opposition candidates, though 
these votes had been refused before — just enough to unseat 
Howard by a minority of four votes. " I was made a vic- 
tim by the ministry," he writes to a friend ; " most surely I 
should not have fallen in with their severe measures relative 
to the Americans ; and my constant declaration that not one 
emolument of live shillings, were I in parliament, would I 
ever accept of, marked me out as an object of their aversion." 
It was a fortunate decision, as it left him to his own peculiar 
work. Set free from all other occupations, instead of em- 
bodying his observations on English prisons at once in a 
book, he thought it better to make a tour of France, the 
Austrian Netherlands, Holland, and Germany, to see the 
most famous and infamous prisons on the continent of 
Europe, collect their various laws and regulations, and com- 
pare their structure, their action, and results with those of 
our own. In Paris he was denied access to the prisons ; but 
looking over the old legislation on the subject, he found a 
provision in an act of 1717, that any person wishing to dis- 
tribute alms to the prisoners was to be admitted to the inte- 



94 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

rior, and allowed to dispense his bounty with his own hand. 
The law had fallen into disuse, and was unknown to the 
keepers. Howard appealed to higher authority, and the 
validity of the old act was allowed. At some expense in 
charities, he inspected the Bicetre, the Force l'Eveque, and 
other places of confinement ; but neither money nor infa 
could open the Bastile to his inspection. He once stepped 
inside its gates at some personal risk. A suppressed pamphlet, 
describing the interior, written by a man who bad Buffered 
confinement, he obtained after much trouble, brought back 
to England, translated, and gave it to the world in his own 
book, an offence which the French government never forgot 
and never forgave. At Ghent he examined with deep 
interest the Great Reformatory Prison, a model for all 
Europe, combining the elements of industry and privation, 
which are still esteemed the most efficacious means of refor- 
mation. At Amsterdam he was struck with the slight 
amount of crime in the Dutch cities, contrasting it a< he did 
so fearfully with the crime in his own country. For one 
hundred years then past, the executions in Amsterdam, a 
city of 250,000 inhabitants, had averaged no more than one 
in twelve months. London with its 750,000 inhabitants, had 
an average of twenty-nine and a half executions a year, or, 
reckoning population against population, ten in London to 
one in Amsterdam. 1 In the United Provinces he found that 

the industrial >ystem penetrated the jail. In England we 

thought only of punishing offences; there they sought to 
reclaim offenders for society. We put them into dungeons; 
they put them into work-hops. They made the criminals 

work their way back to Freedom. Their p; max- 

ima was — * Make them diligent and they will be hoi, 
Howard did not forget the hint. In Germany he found 
little that WSJ u-r|'ul, much that was disgusting. In Hauo- 

1 Jaassea'i fbi '<>, |?79. 



JOHN HOWARD. 95 

ver and Osnaburgh, under English rule, he found traces of 
torture. Hamburgh was less revolting, as were generally 
the commercial cities. He returned to England with his 
papers, plans, and rules, a voluminous collection, as original 
in character as it was humane in purpose ; but before put- 
ting his materials in the printer's hands, he undertook 
another comprehensive tour through England, revising his 
former observations, adding new notes to the record, reliev- 
ing distress, liberating poor debtors, superintending the oper- 
ation of the new jail act ; and when these enormous labors 
were completed after seven months of daily toil, the gains 
from this careful revision seemed so important to his mind, 
that he resolved to give his continental experiences the bene- 
fit of a similar collation, and also extend his researches into 
some countries the prisons of which he had not yet seen. He 
set out for Lyons, crossed to Geneva (where he was rejoiced 
as a republican to find only five persons in confinement), 
whence he passed on to Berne, through cantons in which 
there was not a single prisoner ; he went on to Soleure and 
Basle, delighted with the cleanliness, the Christian disci- 
pline, and considerate government of all the jails of Swit- 
zerland, and struck into {Germany and Holland, visiting or 
revisiting the most celebrated prisons. He returned to Lon- 
don, and published his remarkable - book, The State of 
Prisons in England and Wales, in 1777. In collecting his 
materials he had spent between three and four years, travel- 
ling not less than 13,418 miles. He contrasted in its pages 
the condition of our own and of foreign prisonSj very much 
to the disadvantage of the former. " The reader," he says, 
" will scarcely feel from my narrative the same emotion of 
shame and regret as the comparison excited in me on be- 
holding the difference with my own eyes ; but from the ac- 
count I have given him of foreign prisons he may judge 
whether a design of reforming our own be merely visionary 
— whether idleness, debauchery, disease, and famine be the 



96 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

necessary attendants of a prison, or only connected with it 
in our own ideas, for want of a more perfect knowledge 
and more enlarged views." 

The book made a sensation. One of the first results was 
to give a new impulse to the question — What to do with 
our convicts ? America refused to take them any longer ; 
Australia had not yet offered itself as a receptacle for the 
rascality of England. Government was at its wit's end ; 
and crotchety people were urging every kind of scheme on 
its attention. A hulk (the " Justicia ") had been already 
stationed in the river, off the arsenal of Woolwich, for the 
reception of convicts, who were treated as in the worst 
prisons of the old school, so that every kind of disorder 
existed in the ship. Howard hoped for no success without 
a change of system ; but his continental experience con- 
vinced him that home discipline was better for the criminal 
than deportation to a new country : and, after much con- 
sideration by ministers, his idea of trying the discipline of 
hard ivork was adopted, and Sir William Blackstone and 
Mr. Eden were requested to make out the draft of a bill for 
the creation of a fitting establishment. A new prison was 
needed for the new plans ; no jail in the country could 
answer for a trial; and Howard volunteered to go abroad 
and collect plans and other precise information. 

lie went to Amsterdam, and carefully examined the spin- 
houses and rasp-houses for which that city was famous. Be 

passed into Prussia, Saxony, Bohemia, and Austria, through 
the lines of the German armies commanded by the Great 
Frederick and the Emperor Joseph II. His tame had gone 
before him, and he was received with the greatest distinc- 
tion in Berlin ami Vienna. He spent a morning with the 
Prince of Prussia, and dined with .Maria Theresa. Prom 
Vienna he went to Italy, which lie traversed from Venice to 
Naples, inspecting prisons, hospitals, and workhouses, ami 
carefully hoarding up the peculiar merit or fault of each, lor 



JOHN HOWARD. 97 

the use of Sir William Blackstone and his colleague. On his 
return from Naples towards Leghorn, he encountered a vio- 
lent storm, which raged for three days with great fury. The 
little shallop, unmanageable, was driven on the Tuscan coast, 
but the inhabitants, fearful of plague, refused to allow the 
passengers to land. Driven back again upon the storm, they 
were carried by its force to the African shore, to be again 
driven off by the same fears. They had started from Civita 
Vecchia while the pest was raging there, and their foul bill 
of health alarmed Christian and Mohammedan alike. How- 
ard suffered fearfully in health by this trial ; and, after his 
prison labors were accomplished, and his health fully restored, 
he turned to the new and fearful enemy, and finally lost his 
life in an attempt to discover the cause and the remedy for 
plague. 

During this rapid continental tour he travelled 4,600 
miles. While in France his attention was again drawn to 
his old subject — the infamous neglect and unchristian treat- 
ment of prisoners of war. He was told that these prisoners 
were treated worse in England than elsewhere ; that their 
loyalty was tampered with ; and that they were systemati- 
cally ill-used in order to compel them to forswear their 
allegiance, and enter the English service. Burning with 
indignation, he went to the Commissioners of Sick and 
Wounded Seamen, who expressed their astonishment at such 
assertions ; and, on his saying that he meant to look into this 
affair for himself, they offered to assist his inquiries. Our 
prisoners of war had reason to be grateful for his interference. 

The information obtained during his foreign tour was 
placed at the service of the House of Commons. A bill 
was introduced and passed for building two penitentiary 
houses in Middlesex, Surrey, Kent, or Essex (as might be 
determined afterwards), in which to try the experiment of 
a discipline of work. Howard was appointed first super- 
visor of this Act; Mr. Whatley of the Foundling Hos- 

9 



98 NJBW BIOGRAPHIES. 

pital, second; and Howard was allowed to name the third. 
Dr. Fothergill. 1 The scheme, however, under official re- 
straints, proceeded slowly; Howard felt that his life was 
being wasted in small quarrels and unimportant discussions 
with Mr. Whatley as to the sites of the proposed peniten- 
tiaries ; and both Sir William Blackstone and Dr. Fother- 
gill dying while Mr. Whatley was disputing, lie wrote to 
Lord Bathurst, president of the council, begging the king's 
permission to resign his office. An impulse, however, had 
been given. Howard's ideas were adopted in many places. 
In all the new prisons erected from that time provision was 
made for setting the criminals at work. He turned his face 
to the continent, with a view to collect whatever might he 
useful to his countrymen in those lands which he had not yet 
visited ; and began a new and lenger journey, which gradu- 
ally embraced the whole circle of Europe, his route lying 
through Holland, Schleswig, Denmark. Norway, Sweden, 
Russia, Poland; thence back to London, and so on to Por- 
tugal, Spain, and France, and the Austrian Netherlands. 
This journey was full of curious and romantic incidents. At 
its completion Howard gave his collections to the public in 
a new edition of his State of ftrisons, with appendices. 

Being now free from serious responsibility as regards the 
subject ol" prisons, and being determined not to enter parlia- 
ment (as he was again requested to do), he reverted to the 

terrible idea of the Plague. English commerce with the 
Levant was rapidly extending, and serious thoughts were 
entertained in official circles of establishing a regular quar- 
antine (as at Marseilles and Venice) against all vessels 

arriving from the East. But nothing was known in 1 
land about la/areitos and quarantine establishments: and 
the plague itself (from vague historical recollections ot" the 

London pests ot' 1608 and 1665, when the disease .-wept 

i Stat. 19 Geo. III. Cap 74, 



JOHN HOWARD. 99 

away each time one fifth of the population) 1 was regarded 
with a terror more superstitious than rational. Government 
desired information ; Howard offered to procure it, and 
equipped himself for the journey. He proposed to begin 
his studies at Marseilles with the newest of the lazarettos ; 
afterwards to visit those of Venice and Leghorn ; and, hav- 
ing gained all preliminary information in these cities, to 
proceed to Smyrna and Constantinople, the proper home of 
the plague, and there study its symptoms and modes of 
treatment. The French government, however, mindful 
of the Bastile pamphlet, refused him a passport ; so that, 
instead of gaining facilities for inspecting the lazaretto at 
Marseilles, he was peremptorily forbidden to set foot in 
the territory of France. Lord Carmarthen, our ambassador 
in Paris, tried in vain to remove the ban ; but, as Howard 
considered that his journey would lose much of its interest, 
and its chief use as regarded his own country, if he missed 
the fine lazaretto at Marseilles, he defied the threats held 
out, put himself in a good disguise, and entered France in 
the usual way among travellers in a diligence. A police 
agent attended him to Paris, for the French ambassador at 
the Hague had received intelligence from the M. Le Noir, 
director of police in Paris, to keep watch over his move- 
ments; and it was by a miracle of rapid and courageous 
action that he escaped a dungeon in the Bastile. Some- 
times as a French physician, sometimes as an exquisite of 
the Faubourg St. Germain, he traversed France as far as 
Marseilles, obtained admission to the lazaretto, and shelter 
in the house of a Huguenot pastor, although the police were 
on the look-out for him, with a description of his person in 
their hands. His courage, his disguise, and his perfect 
manners, threw them off their guard ; yet the risks he ran 
were very serious, and he breathed more freely when he 

1 Petty's Political Arithmetic, 1686. 



100 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

bad crossed the frontier. " I have now taken a final leave 
of France," he wrote to a friend from Leghorn ; " I am sen- 
sible that I ran a great risk, but I accomplished my object. 
Happy was I to arrive at Nice, out of the country of a 
deceitful, jealous, and ungenerous people." He went to 
Florence, Rome (where he had an interview with Pope 
Pius), and Naples ; and thence to Smyrna, where his skill 
as a doctor opened all the prisons and hospitals to his in- 
spection. He remained at Smyrna, performing a few simple 
cures which rumor vastly magnified, until a fatal form of 
the plague broke out, and he had first-rate opportunities of 
studying it. He went on to Constantinople, whither the 
fame of his cures had gone before, and as soon as he arrived 
he was called in by a great pasha to treat the case of his 
daughter, who had been given over, it was said, by all the 
Italian doctors. She recovered ; and of course Howard's 
fame rose with his wonderful work. lie confined his visits, 
however, to the pest-houses, the prisons, and hospitals ; he 
said he was only a physician to the poor. Our ambassador, 
Sir Robert Ainslie, aware of his patriotic and humane 
object, offered him a home at the embassy. This lie de- 
clined, as being unwilling to expose another to the fearful 
risk of contagion, and took up his residence in the house of 
a physician, to whom he could communicate the course of 
his daily experience, as well to receive sound advice a- to 
prepare his host for prompt action in case he brought the 
plague home. Hut he bore a charmed life. The smitten 
fell dead at his feet lie went into infected caravansaries 
and into pest-houses whither physician, guide, and drago- 
man all refused to follow him. From these fearful visits he 
returned with a scorching pain across the temples, though 
an hour of fresh air and vigorous exercise served to carry 
it away. At length his researches were complete. With 

a trunk full of papers — plans of lazarettos opinions of 

celebrated physicians living in the Levant, and copies of 



JOHN HOWARD. 101 

regulations and instructions — he prepared to return, and 
wrote to inform his friends of his intention to cross overland 
to Vienna. But while his preparations for departure were 
in progress, the idea flashed across his mind that all his 
acquired knowledge, various as it was, had been obtained 
from others — was second-hand, not original ; that he had 
seen not suffered the discipline of a European Lazaretto ; 
and that, possibly, something of material import to the prac- 
tical working of the scheme (the want of which would be 
felt as soon as the system was commenced, if it ever 
were commenced, in England) had escaped his notice. The 
fear was enough. Altering his plan, he resolved to return ; 
to find a foul ship, make the voyage in her to Venice, and 
there undergo the usual confinement of the suspected in the 
famous lazaretto of that city. Such a plan was full of peril. 
A late ambassador, Mr. Murray, had died of the plague in 
that very lazaretto ; but nothing would deter him from his 
purpose, and he departed. Plague broke out in the ship, 
and a strong man died in a few hours ; yet he went on to 
Smyrna, deliberately sought out a foul vessel, took his berth 
and started for Venice. On the way they were attacked by 
pirates, when Howard astonished the Venetian sailors by 
his courage and by a lesson which he gave them in the 
noble art of gunnery. They acknowledged that the English 
physician had saved them from the slave market of Tunis 
or Tripoli. On the sixtieth day of the voyage they arrived 
in Venice, and were all transferred to the lazaretto, where 
Howard's health suffered severely from the confinement, 
though he was supported with the thought that he was gain- 
ing precious experience. His minute account of the disci- 
pline of this famous Lazaretto is most interesting. 1 

Howard came out of his confinement reduced to a skele- 
ton, and flushed with fever. However anxious to get home 



1 Lazarettos of Europe, pp. 16-22. 



102 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

(for a dreadful domestic calamity had occurred ; his only 
child, now a young man, had lost his reason, and was under 
the charge of a keeper), he was too weak to travel for some 
days. He went to Trieste and Vienna, where he held a 
long and exceedingly curious interview with the Emperor, 
Joseph IL, himself a reformer, or rather an innovator, dur- 
ing which the English gentleman told the German ruler 
some very unusual truths. He reached England in Feb- 
ruary, 1787, having been absent on his extraordinary mis- 
sion sixteen months. 

As soon as his domestic concerns were put into such order 
as they admitted, and his great work on the Lazarettos of 
Europe was published, Howard began a fresh and tinal 
review of the prisons of the three kingdoms. He visited all 
with care, and presented a Bible to each of those in the 
county towns. Vast improvements had already taken place 
in the management and discipline of the prisons, in the 
food, clothing, work, and Christian teaching of the prison- 
ers. Foremost among the magistrates who adopted the 
new system were those of Manchester. They built on the 
banks of the Irweil a large prison, with an express view to 
carrying Howard's ideas into effect ; and on the foundation- 
stone of the edifice they set this inscription, — u That there 
may remain to posterity a monument of the affection and 
gratitude of this country to that most excellent person, who 
has so fully proved the wisdom and humanity of the sepa- 
rate and solitary conlineinent of offenders, this prison is 
inscribed with the name of John HOWARD." This final 
tour of the English jails occupied him for eighteen months ; 
and the results of his inspection were recorded in a new 
edition of his State of Prisons. 

While in the Levant he had enjoyed many opportunities 

of hearing the opinions of merchants and consular agents 

on the prospects of our trade with the East. It was -aid, 
that were it not for fear of the plague, thai trade might be 



JOHN HOWARD. 103 

at once doubled. As we were without quarantine establish- 
ments, the people were afraid of any ships from infected 
districts ; the consequence of which fear was, that the 
Dutch ran away with the traffic, without taking sufficient 
care about the plague. So we lost the profits without 
escaping the risks, as the Dutch ships might as easily intro- 
duce the pest at second-hand as our own at first. This idea 
settled in Howard's mind, and helped to shape towards a 
more practical end those purposes which he pursued from 
purer and more romantic motives. In the postscript to his 
new book on Lazarettos, he told the public of his intention 
to follow up the new inquiries. " To my country," he said 
in a few noble and simple words, the last he addressed to it 
in print, " I commit the result of my past labors. It is my 
intention again to quit it for the purpose of revisiting Rus- 
sia, Turkey, and some other countries, and extending my 
tour into the East. I am not insensible of the dangers that 
must attend such a journey. Should it please God to cut 
off my life in the prosecution of this design, let not my 
conduct be imputed to rashness or enthusiasm, but to a seri- 
ous conviction that I am pursuing the path of duty." These 
words were prophetic. 

From London he went to Riga, thence to St. Petersburg 
and Moscow, from which place he proposed to travel to 
Warsaw, and through Vienna to Constantinople. But the 
war overruled his plans. Russia and Turkey were strug- 
gling fiercely on the Dneiper and the Pruth. Bender had 
just fallen, and the Muscovites were hurrying their forces 
to the south. Sad as had been his experiences, Howard had 
seen nothing to compare in atrocity with the reckless waste 
of life in time of war. The roads were almost choked with 
dead bodies. Raw recruits, most of them too young to 
bear privation, were hurled by forced marches, and at every 
sacrifice, towards the theatre of war. They dropped, and 
were left to die, Hunger, hardship, fever, thinned their 



104 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

ranks as they staggered on towards the Black Sea. How- 
ard had no sympathy with military glory ; and the sicken- 
ing sights which he witnessed on the roads from Moscow to 
Kherson, disgusted him with the hypocrisy of Russia's boast 
of having become a civilized power. Even the great ques- 
tion of the plague was laid aside for a while, in presence of 
all these horrors to be brought to light, all these miseries to 
be assuaged. In his portmanteau he had carried out, for 
the use of his expected plague patients, a quantity of James's 
powders, a medicine believed to possess all save miraculous 
powers ; and he thought he should do wisely in placing 
these powders at the service of the poor Russian serfs who 
were falling in crowds around him, the victims of an in- 
fernal military system. So he went down to the coasts of 
the Black Sea, visited the hospitals of Crement-schouk, 
Otschakow, St. Nicholas, Kherson, and other places. His 
letters and his notes in his journal are heart-rending. M They 
are dreadfully neglected. A heart of stone would almost 
bleed ! The abuses of office are glaring, and I want not 
courage to tell them so." Russian officials, witli the 'cunning 
of an Asiatic race, so soon as they saw that Howard would 
expose their cruelties, and disabuse the western public of its 
false estimate of Russian civilization, an estimate drawn 
from the splendid misrepresentations of Voltaire and those 
French theorists who were willing to depose Providence in 
favor of the Czars — began to throw dust in his eyes. 
They prepared the hospitals for his reception, removed the 
more unsightly objects, pretended that he had inspected all 
where he had seen only a few prepared wards; but his ex- 
perience defeated these attempts at imposition, ami his con- 
ductor gained nothing save the dishonor attaching to a mean 
trick. Whoever wishes to see the military Bystem o\' Rus- 
sia in its true character, as conducted in the villages and 
cities of the Muscovite empire, must study the memorials of 
Howard's last visit to Russia. 



JOHN HOWARD. 105 

He died in the midst of his labors. He caught the camp 
fever at Kherson, from a young lady whom he attended as a 
physician, and died in that city on the morning of January 
20, 1790, and was buried on the road to St. Nicholas. 



JOHN BUNYAN 



John Bunyan, the most popular religious writer in 
the English language, was born at Elstow, about a mile 
from Bedford, in the year 1628. He may be said to have 
been born a tinker. The tinkers then formed a hereditary 
caste, which was held in no high estimation. They were 
generally vagrants and pilferers, and were often eonfounded 
with the gipsies, whom in truth they nearly resembled. 
Bunyan's father was more respectable than most of the 
tribe. He had a fixed residence and was able to send his 
son to a village school where reading and writing were 
taught 

The years of John's boyhood were those during which the 
puritan spirit was in the highest vigor all over England ; 
and nowhere had that spirit more influence than in Bedford- 
shire. It is not wonderful, therefore, that a hid to whom 
nature had given a powerful imagination and sensibility 
which amounted to a disease; Bhould have been early haunted 
by religious terrors. Before he was ten his sports wnv 
interrupted by tits of remorse and despair; and his sleep 
Was disturbed by dreams of fiends trying to fly away with 
him. As he grew older, his mental Conflicts become still 
more violent. The strong language in whieii he described 
them has strangely misled all his biographers except Mr. 
Souther. It has long been an ordinary practice with pious 
(106) 



JOHN BUNYAN. 107 

writers to cite Bunyan as an instance of the supernatural 
power of divine grace to rescue the human soul from the 
lowest depths of wickedness. He is called in one book the 
most notorious of profligates ; in another, the brand plucked 
from the burning. He is designated in Mr. Ivimey's His- 
tory of the Baptists as the depraved Bunyan, the wicked 
tinker of Elstow. Mr. Ryland, a man once of great note 
among the Dissenters, breaks out into the following rhap- 
sody : u No man of common sense and common integrity 
can deny that Bunyan was a practical atheist, a worthless 
contemptible infidel, a vile rebel to God and goodness, a 
common profligate, a soul-despising, a soul-murdering, a soul- 
damning, thoughtless wretch as could exist on the face of 
the earth. Now be astonished, O heavens, to eternity ! and 
wonder, O earth and hell! while time endures. Behold 
this very man become a miracle of mercy, a mirror of 
wisdom, goodness, holiness, truth, and love." But whoever 
takes the trouble to examine the evidence will find that the 
good men who wrote this had been deceived by a phrase- 
ology which, as they had been hearing it and using it all 
their lives, they ought to have understood better. There 
cannot be a greater mistake than to infer from the strong 
expressions in which a devout man bemoans his exceeding 
sinfulness, that he had led a worse life than his neighbors. 
Many excellent persons, whose moral character from boy- 
hood to old age has been free from any stain discernible to 
their fellow-creatures, have, in their autobiographies and 
diaries, applied to themselves, and doubtless with sincerity, 
epithets as severe as could be applied to Titus Oates or Mrs. 
Brownrigg. It is quite certain that Bunyan was, at eighteen, 
what, in any but the most austerely puritanical circles, would 
have been considered as a young man of singular gravity and 
innocence. Indeed, it may be remarked that he, like many 
other penitents who, in general terms, acknowledged them- 
selves to have been the worst of mankind, fired up and 



108 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

stood vigorously on his defence, whenever any particular 
charge was brought against him by others. He declares, 
it is true, that he had let loose the reins on the neck of 
his lusts, that he had delighted in all transgressions against 
the divine law, and that he had been the ringleader of the 
youth of Elstow in all manner of vice. But when those 
who wished him ill accused him of licentious amours, he called 
on God and the angels to attest his purity. No woman, 
he said, in heaven, earth, or hell, could charge him with hav- 
ing ever made any improper advances to her. Not only 
had he been strictly faithful to his wife ; but he had, even 
before his marriage, been perfectly spotless. It does not 
appear from his own confessions, or from the railings of his 
enemies, that he ever was drunk in his life. One bad habit 
he contracted, that of using profane language ; but he tells 
us that a single reproof cured him so effectually that he 
never offended again. The worst that can be laid to the 
charge of this poor youth, whom it has been the fashion to 
represent as the most desperate of reprobates, as a village 
Rochester, is that he had a great liking for some diversions, 
quite harmless in themselves, but condemned by the rigid 
precisians among whom he lived, and for whose opinion he 
had a great respect. The four chief sins of which he was 
guilty were dancing, ringing the bells of the parish church, 
playing at tipcat, and reading the History of Sir Bevis of 
Southampton. A Rector of the school of Laud would have 
held such a young man up to the whole parish as a model. 
But Bunyan's notions of good and evil had been learned in 
a very different school ; and he was made miserable by the 
conflict between his tastes and his scruples. 

When lie was about seventeen, the ordinary course of his 
life was interrupted by an event which gave a lasting color 
to his thoughts. He enlisted in the parliamentary army, 
and served during the decisive campaign of 16*45. All that 
we know of his military career is that, at the siege of Leices- 



JOHN BUNYAN. 109 

ter, one of his comrades, who had taken his post, was killed 
by a shot from the town. Bunyan ever after considered 
himself as having been saved from death by the special 
interference of Providence. It may be observed that his 
imagination was strongly impressed by the glimpse which he 
had caught of the pomp of war. To the last he loved to 
draw his illustrations of sacred things from camps and for- 
tresses, from guns, drums, trumpets, flags of truce, and regi- 
ments arrayed, each under its own banner. His Great Heart, 
his Captain Boanerges, and his Captain Credence, are evi- 
dently portraits, of which the originals were among those 
martial saints who fought and expounded in Fairfax's army. 
In a few months Bunyan returned home, and married. 
His wife had some pious relations, and brought him as her 
only portion, some pious books. And now his mind, excit- 
able by nature, very imperfectly disciplined by education, 
and exposed, without any protection, to the infectious viru- 
lence of the enthusiasm which was then epidemic in Eng- 
land, began to be fearfully disordered. In outward things 
he soon became a strict Pharisee. He was constant in 
attendance at prayers and sermons. His favorite amuse- 
ments were, one after another, relinquished, though not 
without many painful struggles. In the middle of a game 
of tipcat he paused, and stood staring wildly upwards with 
his stick in his hand. He had heard a voice asking him 
whether he would leave his sins and go to heaven, or keep 
his sins and go to hell ; and he had seen an awful counte- 
nance frowning on him from the sky. The odious" vice of 
bell-ringing he renounced ; but he still for a time ventured to 
go to the church-tower and look on while others pulled the 
ropes. But soon the thought struck him that, if he per- 
sisted in such wickedness, the steeple would fall on his head ; 
and he fled in terror from the accursed place. To give up 
dancing on the village green was still harder ; and some 
months elapsed before he had the fortitude to part with this 
10 



110 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

darling sin. When this last sacrifice had been made, he 
was, even when tried by the maxims of that austere time, 
faultless. All Elstow talked Of him as an eminently pious 
youth. But his own mind was more unquiet than ever. 
Having nothing more to do in the way of visible reforma- 
tion, yet finding in religion no pleasures to supply the place 
of the juvenile amusements which he had relinquished, he 
began to apprehend that he lay under some special maledic- 
tion ; and he was tormented by a succession of fantasies 
which seemed likely to drive him to suicide or to Bedlam. 

At one time he took it into his head that all persons of 
Israelite blood would be saved, and tried to make out that 
he partook of that blood ; but his hopes were speedily 
destroyed by his father, who seems to have had no ambition 
to be regarded as a Jew. 

At another time Bunyan was disturbed by a strange 
dilemma: "If I have not faith, I am lost; if I have faith, 
I can work miracles." He was tempted to cry to the pud- 
dles between Elstow and Bedford, " Be ye dry," and to stake 
his eternal hopes on the event. 

Then he took up a notion that the day of grace for Bed- 
ford and the neighboring villages was passed ; that all who 
were to be saved in that part of England were already eon- 
verted ; and that he had begun to pray and strive some 
months too late. 

Then he was harassed by doubts whether the Turks 
Were not in the right, and the Christians in the wrong. Then 
he was 'troubled by a maniaeal impulse which prompted him 
to pray to the trees, to a broomstick, to the parish bull. As 
yet, however, he was only entering the valley of the Shadow 
of Death. Soon the darkness grew thicker. Hideous forms 
ll« cited before him. Sounds of cursing and wailing were in 
hifl ears. His way ran through steneh and tire, close to the 
DlOUth of the bottomless pit lie began to be haunted by 
a strange curiosity about the unpardonable sin, and by a 



JOHN BUNYAN. Ill 

morbid longing to commit it. But the most frightful of all 
the forms which his disease took was a propensity to utter 
blasphemy, and especially to renounce his share in the 
benefits of the redemption. Night and day, in bed, at table, 
at work, evil spirits, as he imagined, were repeating close 
to his ear the words, " Sell him, sell him." He struck at 
the hobgoblins ; he pushed them from him ; but still they 
were ever at his side. He cried out in answer to them, 
hour after hour, " Never, never ; not for thousands of 
worlds ; not for thousands." At length, worn out by this 
long agony, he suffered the fatal words to escape him, " Let 
him go, if he will." Then his misery became more fearful 
than ever. He had done what could not be forgiven. He 
had forfeited his part of the great sacrifice. Like Esau, he 
had sold his birthright ; and there was no longer any place 
for repentance. " None," he afterwards wrote, " knows the 
terrors of those days but myself." He has described his 
sufferings with singular energy, simplicity, and pathos. He 
envied the brutes, he envied the very stones in the streets, 
and the tiles on the houses. The sun seemed to withhold 
its light and warmth from him.. His body, though cast in a 
sturdy mould, and though still in the highest vigor of youth, 
trembled whole days together with the fear of death and 
judgment. He fancied that this trembling was the sign set 
on the worst reprobates, the sign which God had put on 
Cain. The unhappy man's emotion destroyed his power of 
digestion. He had such pains that he expected to burst 
asunder like Judas, whom he regarded as his prototype. 

Neither the books which Bunyan read, nor the advisers 
whom he consulted, were likely to do much good in a case 
like his. His small library had received a most unseasona- 
ble addition, the account of the lamentable end of Francis 
Spira. One ancient man of high repute for piety, whom 
the sufferer consulted, gave an opinion which might well 
have produced fatal consequences. "I am afraid," said 



112 NEW BIOGRAnilES. 

Bunyan, " that I have committed the sin against the Holy 
Ghost." " Indeed," said the old fanatic, " I am afraid that 
you have." 

At length the clouds broke ; the light became clearer and 
clearer ; and the enthusiast, who had imagined that he was 
branded with the mark of the first murderer, and destined 
to the end of the arch traitor, enjoyed peace and a cheerful 
confidence in the mercy of God. Years elapsed, however, 
before his nerves, which had been so perilously overstrained, 
recovered their tone. When he had joined a Baptist society 
at Bedford, and was for the first time admitted to partake 
of the Eucharist, it was with difficulty that he could refrain 
from imprecating destruction on his brethren while the cup 
w T as passing from hand to hand. After he had been some 
time a member of the congregation, he began to preach ; 
and his sermons produced a powerful effect. He was indeed 
illiterate ; but he spoke to illiterate men. The severe train- 
ing through which he had passed had given him such an 
experimental knowledge of all the modes of religious mel- 
ancholy as he could never have gathered from books ; and 
his vigorous genius, animated by a fervent spirit of devotion, 
enabled him not only to exercise a great influence over the 
vulgar, but even to extort the half contemptuous admiration 
of scholars. Yet it was long before he ceased to be tor- 
mented by an impulse which urged him to utter words of 
horrible impiety in the pulpit. 

Counter-irritants are of as great use in moral as in physi- 
cal diseases. It should seem that Banyan was finally 
relieved from the internal Bufferings which had embittered 
his life by sharp persecution from without. He had been 
five years a preacher, when the Restoration put it in the 
power of the Cavalier gentlemen ami clergymen all over the 
country to oppress the Dissenters; and, of all the Dissent- 
ers whose history is known to us, he was perhaps the most 
hardly treated. In November, I860, he was Hung into Bed- 



JOHN BUNYAN. 113 

ford gaol ; and there he remained, with some intervals of 
partial and precarious liberty, during twelve years. His 
persecutors tried to extort from him a promise that he would 
abstain from preaching ; but he was convinced that he was 
divinely set apart and commissioned to be a teacher of right- 
eousness, and he was fully determined to obey God rather 
than man. He was brought before several tribunals, laughed 
at, caressed, reviled, menaced, but in vain. He was face- 
tiously told that he was quite right in thinking that he ought 
not to hide his gift ; but that his real gift was skill in repair- 
ing old kettles. He was compared to Alexander the copper- 
smith. He was told that, if he would give up preaching, 
he should be instantly liberated. He was warned that, if he 
persisted in disobeying the law, he would be liable to banish- 
ment, and that, if he were found in England after a certain 
time, his neck would be stretched. His answer was, " If 
you let me out to-day, I will preach again to-morrow." 
Year after year he lay patiently in a dungeon, compared 
with which the worst prison now to be found in the island is 
a palace. His fortitude is the more extraordinary, because 
his domestic feelings were unusually strong. Indeed, he 
was considered by his stern brethren as somewhat too fond 
and indulgent a parent. He had several small children, 
and among them a daughter who was blind, and whom he 
love^i with peculiar tenderness. He could not, he said, bear 
even to let the wind blow on her ; and now she must suffer 
cold and hunger ; she must b«g ; she must be beaten ; '* yet," 
he added, " I must, I must do it." While he lay in prison 
he could do nothing in the way of his old trade for the sup- 
port of his family. He determined, therefore, to take up a 
new trade. He learned to make long tagged thread laces ; 
and many thousands of these articles were furnished by him 
to the hawkers. While his hands were thus busied, he had 
Other employment for his mind and lips. He gave religious 
instruction to his fellow-captives ; and formed among tjiem a 
10* 



114 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

little flock, of which he was himself the pastor. He studied 
indefatigably the few books which he possessed. His two 
chief companions were the Bible and Fox's Book of Mar- 
tyrs. His knowledge of the Bible was such that he might 
have been called a living concordance ; and on the margin 
of his copy of the Book of Martyrs are still legible the 
ill-spelt lines of doggerel in which he expressed his reverence 
for the brave sufferers, and his implacable enmity to the 
mystical Babylon. 

At length he began to write, and, though it was some time 
before he discovered where his strength lay, his writings 
were not unsuccessful. They were coarse, indeed, but they 
showed a keen mother-wit, a great command of the homely 
mother-tongue, an intimate knowledge of the English Bible, 
and a vast and dearly bought spiritual experience. They 
therefore, when the corrector of the press had improved the 
syntax and the spelling, were well received by the humbler 
class of Dissenters. 

Much of Bunyan's time was spent in controversy. He 
wrote sharply against the Quakers, whom he seems always 
to have held in utter abhorrence. It is, however, a remark- 
able fact, that he adopted one of their peculiar fashions : his 
practice was to write, not November or December, but 
eleventh month and twelfth month. 

He wrote against the liturgy of the Church of England. 
No two things, according to him, had less affinity than the 
form of prayer and the spirit of prayer. Those, lie said 
with much point, who have most of the spirit of prayer, are 
all to be found in gaol; and those who have most zeal for 
the form of prayer are all to be found at the ale-house. 
The doctrinal articles, on the other hand, he warmly praised, 
and defended against some Arminian clergyman who had 
signed them. The most acrimonious of all his works, is his 
answer to Edward Fowler, afterwards bishop of Gloucester, 
an excellent man, but not free from the taint of Pelagian- 
ism. 



JOHN BUNYAN. 115 

Bunyan had also a dispute with some of the chiefs of the 
sect to which he belonged. He doubtless held with perfect 
sincerity the distinguishing tenet of that sect, but he did not 
consider that tenet as one of high importance ; and willingly 
joined in communion with pious Presbyterians and Inde- 
pendents. The sterner Baptists, therefore, loudly pro- 
nounced him a false brother. A controversy arose which 
long survived the original combatants. In our own time 
the cause which Bunyan had defended with rude logic and 
rhetoric against Kiffin and Danvers was pleaded by Robert 
Hall with an ingenuity and eloquence such as no polemical 
writer has ever surpassed. 

During the years which immediately followed the Res- 
toration, Bunyan's confinement seems to have been strict. 
But as the passions of 1660 cooled, as the hatred with 
which the Puritans had been regarded while their reign 
was recent gave place to pity, he was less and less harshly 
treated. The distress of his family, and his own patience, 
courage, and piety, softened the hearts of his persecutors. 
Like his own Christian in the cage, he found protectors 
even among the crowd of Vanity Fair. The Bishop of the 
diocese, Dr. Barlow, is said to have interceded for him. At 
length the prisoner was suffered to pass most of his time 
beyond the walls of the gaol, on condition, as it should 
seem, that he remained within the town of Bedford. 

He owed his complete liberation to one of the worst acts of 
one of the worst governments that England has ever seen. 
In 1671 the Cabal was in power. Charles II. had concluded 
the treaty by which he bound himself to set up the Roman 
Catholic religion in England. The first step which he took 
towards that end was to annul, by an unconstitutional exer- 
cise of his prerogative, all the penal statutes against the 
Roman Catholics ; and, in order to disguise his real design, 
he annulled at the same time the penal statutes against 
Protestant non-conformists. Bunyan was consequently set 



116 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. * 

at large. In the first warmth of his gratitude he published 
a tract in which he compared Charles to that humane and 
generous Persian king who, though not himself blessed with 
the light of the true religion, favored the chosen people, 
and permitted them, after years of captivity, to rebuild their 
beloved temple. To candid men, who consider how much 
Bunyan had suffered, and how little he could guess the 
secret design of the court, the unsuspicious thankfulness 
with which he accepted the precious boon of freedom will 
not appear to require any apology. 

Before he left his prison he had begun the book which 
has made his name immortal. The history of that book is 
remarkable. The author was, as he tells us, writing a trea- 
tise in which he had occasion to speak of the stages of the 
Christian progress. He compared that progress, as many 
others had compared it, to a pilgrimage. Soon his quick 
wit discovered innumerable points of similarity which had 
escaped his predecessors. Images came crowding on his 
mind faster than he could put them into words, quagmires 
and pits, steep hills, dark and horrible glens, soft vales, 
sunny pastures, a gloomy castle of which the court-yard 
was strewn with the skulls and bones of murdered prison- 
ers, a town* all bustle and splendor, like London on the 
Lord Mayor's Day, and the narrow path, straight as a rule 
could make it, running on up hill and down hill, through 
city and through wilderness, to the Black River and Shin- 
ing Gate. He had found out, as most people would have 
said, by accident, as he would doubtless have said, by the 
guidance of Providence, where his powers lay. He had no 
suspicion, indeed, that he was producing a inaMerpieee. 
He could not guess what place his allegory would occupy 
in English literature ; for of English literature he knew 
nothing. Those who suppose him to have studied the 
Fairy Queen might easily be confuted, if this were the 
proper place tor a detailed estimation of the passages in 



JOHN BUNYAN. 117 

which the two allegories have been thought to resemble 
each other. The only work of fiction, in all probability, 
with which he could compare his Pilgrim, was his old favor- 
ite, the legend of Sir Bevis of Southampton. He would 
have thought it a sin to borrow any time from the serious 
business of his life, from his expositions, his controversies, 
and his lace tags, for the purpose of amusing himself with 
what he considered a mere trifle. It was only, he assures 
us, at spare moments that he returned to the House Beauti- 
ful, the Delectable Mountains, and the Enchanted Ground. 
He had no assistance. Nobody but himself saw a line till 
the whole was complete. He then consulted his pious 
friends. Some were pleased, others were much scandal- 
ized. It was a vain story, a mere romance, about giants, 
and lions, and goblins, and warriors, sometimes fighting 
with monsters, and sometimes regaled by fair ladies in 
stately palaces. The loose atheistical wits of Will's might 
write such stuff to divert the painted Jezebels of the court ! 
but did it become a minister of the Gospel to copy the evil 
fashions of the world? There had been a time when the 
cant of such fools would have made Bunyan miserable. 
But that time was passed ; and his mind was now in a firm 
and healthy state. He saw that, in employing fiction to 
make truth clear and goodness attractive, he was only fol- 
lowing the example which every Christian ought to propose 
to himself; and he determined to print. 

The Pilgrim's Progress stole silently into the world. Not 
a single copy of the first edition is known to be in exist- 
ence. The year of publication has not been ascertained. 
It is probable that, during some months, the little volume 
circulated only among poor and obscure sectaries. But 
soon the irresistible charm of a book which gratified the 
imagination of the reader, with all the action and scenery 
of a fairy tale, which exercised his ingenuity by setting him 
to discover a multitude of curious analogies, which inter- 



118 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

ested his feelings for human beings, frail like himself, and 
struggling with temptations from within and from without, 
which every moment drew a smile from him by some stroke 
of quaint yet simple pleasantry, and nevertheless left on his 
mind a sentiment of reverence for God and of sympathy 
for man, began to produce its effect. In puritanical circles, 
from which plays and novels were strictly excluded, that 
effect was such as no work of genius, though it were supe- 
rior to the Iliad, to Don Quixote, or to Othello, can ever 
produce on a mind accustomed to indulge in literary luxury. 
In 1678 came forth a second edition with additions; and 
then the demand became immense. In the four following 
years the book was reprinted six times. The eighth edi- 
tion, which contains the last improvements made by the 
author, was published in 1682, the ninth in 1684, the tenth 
in 1685. The help of the engraver had early been called 
in ; and tens of thousands of children looked with terror 
and delight on execrable copperplates, which represented 
Christian thrusting his sword into Apollyon, or writhing in 
the grasp of Giant Despair. In Scotland, and in some of 
the colonies, the Pilgrim was even more popular than in his 
native country. Bunyan has told us, with very pardonable 
vanity, that in New England his dream was the daily sub- 
ject of the conversation of thousands, and was thought 
worthy to appear in the most superb binding. He had 
numerous admirers in Holland, and among the Huguenots 
of France. With the pleasures, however, he experienced 
some of the pains of eminence. Knavish booksellers put 
forth volumes of trash under his name, and envious serib- 
blers maintained it to be impossible that the poor ignorant 
tinker should really be the author of the book which was 
called his. 

lie took tin 1 best way to confound both those who counter- 
feited him and those who slandered him. He continued to 
work the Gold-iield which he had discovered, and to draw 



JOHN BUKYAN. 119 

from it new treasures, not indeed with quite such ease and 
in quite such abundance as when the precious soil was still 
virgin, but yet with success which left all competition far 
behind. In 1684 appeared the second part of the Pilgrim's 
Progress. It was soon followed by the Holy War, which, if 
the Pilgrim's Progress did not exist, would be the best alle- 
gory that ever was written. 

Bunyan's place in society was now very different from 
what it had been. There had been a time when many Dis- 
senting ministers, who could talk Latin and read Greek, had 
affected to treat him with scorn. But his fame and influence 
now far exceeded theirs. He had so great an authority 
among the Baptists that he was popularly called Bishop 
Bunyan. His episcopal visitations were annual. From 
Bedford he rode every year to London, and preached there 
to large and attentive congregations. From London he 
went his circuit through the country, animating the zeal of 
his brethren, collecting and distributing alms, and making up 
quarrels. The magistrates seem in general to have given 
him little trouble. But there is reason to believe that, in 
the year 1685, he was in some danger of again occupying 
his old quarters in Bedford gaol. In that year the rash and 
wicked enterprise of Monmouth gave the government a pre- 
text for prosecuting the non-conformists ; and scarcely one 
eminent divine of the Presbyterian, Independent, or Baptist 
persuasion remained unmolested. Baxter was in prison ; 
Howe was driven into exile; Henry was arrested. Two 
eminent Baptists, with whom Bunyan had been engaged in 
controversy, were in great peril and distress. Danvers was 
in danger of being hanged ; and Kiffin's grandsons were 
actually hanged. The tradition is that, during those evil 
days, Bunyan was forced to disguise himself as a wagoner, 
and that he preached to his congregation at Bedford in a 
smockfrock, with a . cart whip in his hand. But soon a 
great change took place. James the Second was at open 



120 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

war with the church, and found it necessary to court the 
Dissenters. Some of the creatures of the government tried 
to secure the aid of Bunyan. They probably knew that he 
had written in praise of the indulgence of 1672, and there- 
fore hoped he might be equally pleased with the indulgence 
of 1687. But fifteen years of thought, observation, and 
commerce with the world had made him wiser. Nor were 
the cases exactly parallel. Charles was a professed Prot- 
estant: James was a professed Papist. The object of 
Charles's indulgence was disguised ; the object of James's in- 
dulgence was patent. Bunyan was not deceived. He ex- 
horted his hearers to prepare themselves by fasting and 
prayer for the danger which menaced their civil and relig- 
ious liberties, and refused even to speak to the courtier who 
came down to remodel the corporation of Bedford, and who, 
as was supposed, had it in charge to offer some municipal 
dignity to the Bishop of the Baptists. 

Bunyan did not live to see the Revolution. In the sum- 
mer of 1 688, he undertook to plead the cause of a son with 
an angry father, and at length prevailed on the old man not 
to disinherit the young one. This good work cost the be- 
nevolent intercessor his life. He had to ride through heavy 
rain. He came drenched to his lodgings on Snow Hill, was 
seized with a violent fever, and died in a few days. He was 
buried in Bunhill Fields ; and the spot where he lies is still 
regarded by the non-conformists with a feeling which seems 
scarcely in harmony with the stern spirit of their theology. 
Many puritans to whom the respect paid by Roman Catho- 
lics to the reliques and tombs of saints seemed childish or 
sinful, are said to have begged with their dying breath that 
their coffins might be placed as near as possible to the coffin 
of the author of the Pilgrim's Progress. 

The lame of Bunyan during his lite, ami during the cen- 
tury which followed his death, was indeed great, but was 
almost entirely confined to religious families of the middle 



JOHN BUNYAN. 121 

and lower classes. Very seldom was he during that time 
mentioned with respect by any writer of great literary emi- 
nence. Young coupled his prose with the poetry of the 
wretched D'Urfey. In the Spiritual Quixote, the adven- 
tures of Christian are ranked with those of Jack the Giant- 
Killer or John Hickathrift. Cowper ventured to praise the 
great allegorist, but did not venture to name him. It is a 
significant circumstance that, till a recent period, all the nu- 
merous editions of the Pilgrim's Progress were evidently 
meant for the cottage and the servant's hall. The paper, 
the printing, the plates, were all of the meanest description. 
In general, when the educated minority and the common 
people differ about the merit of a book, the opinion of the 
educated minority finally prevails. The Pilgrim's Progress is 
perhaps the only book about which, after the lapse of a 
hundred years, the educated minority has come over to the 
opinion of the common people. 

The attempts which have been made to improve and to im- 
itate this book are not to be numbered. It has been done into 
verse ; it has been done into modern English. The Pilgrimage 
of Tender Conscience, the Pilgrimage of Good Intent, the 
Pilgrimage of Seek Truth, the Pilgrimage of Theophilus, the 
Infant Pilgrim, the Hindoo Pilgrim, are among the many 
feeble copies of the great original. But the peculiar glory of 
Bunyan is that those who most hated his doctrines have tried 
to borrow the help of his genius. A Catholic version of his 
parable may be seen with the head of the Virgin in the title- 
page. On the other hand, those Antinomians for whom his 
Calvinism is not strong enough, may study the pilgrimage of 
Hephsibah, in which nothing will be found which can be 
construed into an admission of free agency and universal 
redemption. But the most extraordinary of all the acts of 
vandalism by which a fine work of art was ever defaced, 
was committed so late as the year 1853. It was determined 
to transform the Pilgi'im's Progress into a Tractarian book. 
11 



122 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

The task was not easy ; for it was necessary to make the two 
sacraments the most prominent objects in the allegory ; and 
of all Christian theologians, avowed Quakers excepted, 
Bunyan was the one in whose system the sacraments held 
the least prominent place. However, the Wicket Gate be- 
came a type of baptism, and the House Beautiful of the 
Eucharist. The effect of this change is such as assuredly 
the ingenious person who made it never contemplated. For, 
as not a single pilgrim passes through the Wicket Gate in 
infancy, and as Faithful hurries past the House Beautiful 
without stopping, the lesson which the fable in its altered 
shape teaches, is that none but adults ought to be baptized, 
and that the Eucharist may safely be neglected. Nobody 
would have discovered from the original Pilgrim's Progress 
that the author was not a Pasdobaptist. To turn his book 
into a book against Psedobaptism was an achievement re- 
served for an Anglo-Catholic Divine. Such blunders must 
necessarily be committed by every man who mutilates parts 
of a great work, without taking a comprehensive view of 
the whole. 



HORACE 



Quintus Horatius Flaccus, the most popular, and 
next to Catullus and Virgil, the greatest of the Roman 
poets, was born VI. Id. Dec. a. u. c. 689, (Dec. 8, b. c. 
65), during the consulship of L. Aurelius Cotta and L. 
Manlius Torquatus, and died November 27, a. u. c. 746, 
(b. c. 8). Horace is his own biographer. All the mate- 
rial facts of his personal history are to be gathered from the 
allusions scattered throughout his poems. A memoir attrib- 
uted to Suetonius, of somewhat doubtful authority, furnishes 
a few additional details, but none of material moment, either 
as to his character or career. His father was a freedman, x 
and it was long considered that he had been a slave of some 
member of the great family of the Horatii, whose name he 
had assumed, in accordance with the common usage in such 
cases. But this theory has latterly given place to the sug- 
gestion, based upon inscriptions, that he was a freedman of 
the town of Venusia, (the modern Venosa,) the inhabitants 
of which belonged to the Horatian tribe. 2 The point is, 
however, of little importance, as the name, distinguished as 

1 Satires, I. vi. 6, 46-47. 

2 G. I\ Grotefend, Encyclopddie von Ersch und Gniber, 2d sec. Vol. 
X. p. 497, Leipzig, 1833; and C L. Grotefend, Ephemerid. Literar., 
Darmstadt, 1834, p. 182; and Mommsen's Inscriptiones Regni Nea- 
politini, Lipsiae, 1852. 

(123) 



124 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

it was, has derived more lustre from the poet than from any 
of the patriots and heroes by whom it had previously been 
borne. The elder Horace had received his manumission 
before his son was born. 1 He had realized a moderate in- 
dependence in the vocation of coactor, a name borne indif- 
ferently by the collectors of public revenue, and of money at 
sales by public auction. To which of these classes he be- 
longed is uncertain, but most probably to the latter. 2 With the 
fruits of his industry he had purchased a small property near 
Venusia, upon the banks of the Aufidus, the modern Ofanto, 
in the midst of the Apennines, upon the doubtful boundaries 
of Lucania and Apulia. Here the poet was born, and in 
this picturesque region of mountain, forest, and stream, the 
boy became imbued with the love of nature, which distin- 
guished him through life. The third ode of the fourth book 
affords a pleasing glimpse of the child, wandering out of 
bounds along the slopes of Mount Vultur, and being found 
after an anxious search, asleep under a covering of laurel 
and myrtle leaves, which the wild pigeons had spread to 
shield this special favorite of the gods from the snakes and 
wild animals. The augury of the future poet, said to have 
been drawn from the incident at the time, was no doubt an 
after-thought of the poet's own, but the picture which the 
lines present of the strayed child asleep, with his hands full 
of spring flowers is welcome, whatever may he thought of 
the omen. In his father's house, and in those of the Apulian 
peasantry around him, Horace had opportunities of becom- 
ing familiar with the simple virtues of the poor, — their in- 
dependence, integrity, chastity, and homely worth, which he 
loved to contrast with the luxury and vice of imperial Koine. 
Of his mother no mention occurs, directly or indirectly, 
throughout his poems, and it is reasonable to infer from this 
Circumstance, taken in connection with the indications which 

1 Satires, I. vi., 8. - Satire*, I. vi., 86. 



HORACE. 125 

they present of strong natural affection, that she died during 
his infancy. He appears also to have been an only child. 
No doubt he had at an early age given evidence of superior 
powers, and to this it may have been in some measure owing 
that his father thought him worthy of a higher education than 
could be obtained under a provincial schoolmaster, 1 and, 
although but ill able to afford it, carried him to Rome when 
about twelve years old, and gave him the best education 
which the capital could supply. No expense was spared to 
save the boy from any sense of inferiority among his fellow- 
scholars of the highest ranks. He was waited on by numer- 
ous slaves, as though he were the heir to a considerable for- 
tune. But at the same time he was not allowed to enter- 
tain any shame for his own order, or to aspire to a position 
which he was unequal to maintain. His father taught him 
to look forward to filling some situation akin to that in which 
he had himself acquired a competency, and to feel that in 
any sphere culture and self-respect must command influence, 
and afford the best guarantee for happiness. Under the 
stern tutorage of Orbilius Pupillus, a grammarian of high 
standing, richer in reputation than gold, whom the poet has 
condemned to a bad immortality for his flogging propensi- 
ties, he learned grammar, and became, familiar with the 
earlier Latin writers, and with Homer. He also acquired 
such other branches of instruction as were usually learned 
by the sons of Romans of the higher ranks. But what was 
of still more importance, during this critical period of his 
first introduction to the seductions of the capital, he enjoyed 
the advantage of his father's personal superintendence, and 
of a moral training, which kept him aloof, not merely from 
the indulgence, but even from the contact of vice. His father 
went with him to all his classes, 2 and being, himself a man 
of shrewd observation and natural humor, he gave his son's 

1 Satires, I. vi., 71, et seq. 2 Satires, I. vi., 18, et seq. 

11* 



126 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

studies a practical bearing, by directing his attention to the 
follies and vices of the luxurious and dissolute society around 
him, 1 and showing their incompatibility with the dictates of 
reason and common sense. From this admirable father, 
Horace appears to have inherited that manly independence 
for which he was remarkable, and which, while assigning to 
all ranks their due influence and respect, never either over- 
estimates or compromises its own. 

Under the homely exterior of the Apulian freedman, we 
see the soul of the gentleman. His influence on his son was 
manifestly great. In the fult maturity of his powers Horace 
penned a tribute to his worth, 2 with a fervor manifestly 
prompted by the full heart of a man who had often had 
cause to feel the blessings of that influence throughout the 
vicissitudes of a chequered life. It had given tone and 
strength to his character, and in the midst of manifold temp- 
tations had kept him true to himself and his genius. 

At what age Horace left his father is uncertain. Most 
probably this event occurred before he left Rome for Athens 
to complete his education, as was then the practice, in the 
Greek literature and philosophy, under native teachers. 
This he did some time between the age of seventeen and 
twenty. At Athens he found many young men of the 
leading Roman families — Bibulus, Acidinus, Messala, and 
the younger Cicero — engaged in the same pursuits with him- 
self. His works prove him to have been no careless student 
of the classics of Grecian literature, and with a natural en- 
thusiasm he made his first poetical essays in their flexible and 
noble language. With his usual good sense, however, lie 
soon abandoned the hopeless task of emulating the Greek 
writers on their own ground, and directed his effort* to 
transfusing into his own language some of the grace and 
melody of these masters of song. 3 In the political lull be- 

1 Satires, I. vi., 10."). <t weq. - Satires, 1. vi.. 68, d .--<//. 

i! Satires. I. x.. 81-86. 



HORACE. 127 

tween the battle of Pharsalia, a. u. c. 706 (b. c. 48), and 
the death of Julius Caesar, a. u. c. 710 (b. c. 44), Horace 
was enabled to devote himself without interruption to 
the tranquil pursuits of the scholar. But when after the 
latter event Brutus came to Athens, and the patrician youth 
of Rome, fired with zeal for the cause of republican liberty, 
joined his standard, Horace was infected by the general en- 
thusiasm, and accepted a military command in the army 
which was destined to encounter the legions of Anthony 
and Octavius. His rank was that of tribune, equivalent to 
a colonelcy of foot in our own army, and for this he must have 
been indebted either to the personal friendship of Brutus or 
to an extraordinary dearth of officers, seeing that he was not 
only without experience or birth to recommend him, but 
possessed no particular aptitude, physical or moral, for a 
military life. His appointment excited jealousy among his 
brother officers, who considered that the command of a Ro- 
man legion should have been reserved for men of nobler 
blood. 1 It was probably here that he first came into direct 
collision with the aristocratic prejudices which the training 
of his father had taught him to defy, and which, at a subse- 
quent period, grudged to the freedman's son the friendship 
of the emperor and of Maecenas. At the same time he had 
doubtless a strong party of friends, who had learned to ap- 
preciate his genius and attractive qualities. It is certain 
that he secured the esteem of his commanders, and bore an 
active part in the perils and difficulties of the campaign, 
which terminated in a total defeat of the republican party 
at Philippi, a. u. c. 712 (b. c. 42). A playful allusion by 
himself to the events of that disastrous field 2 has been 
turned by many of his commentators into an admission of his 
own cowardice. This is absurd. Such a confession is the 
very last which any man, least of all a Roman, would 

1 Satires, I. vi., 46, et seq. 2 Odes, II. vi., 9, el seq. 



128 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

make. Horace says, addressing his friend Pompeius 
Varius : — 

" With thee I shared Philippi's fiery flight, 
My shield behind me left, which was not well, 
When all that brave array was broke, and fell 
In the vile dust full many a towering wight." 

Such an allusion to the loss of his shield could only have 
been dropped by a man who felt that he had done his duty, 
and that it was known that he had done it. The lines may 
thus be safely regarded, according to the views of Lessing 
and others, as a not ungraceful compliment to his friend, 
who continued the struggle against the triumvirate with the 
party who threw themselves into the fleet of Sextus Pom- 
peius. This interpretation is confirmed by the language of 
the next verse, where, in the same spirit, he applies the 
epithet " paventem " (craven) to himself. 

" But me, poor craven, swift Mercurius bore, 
Wrapp'd in a cloud through all the hostile din, 
While war's tumultuous eddies, closing in, 
Swept thee away into the strife once more." 

It was no shame in Horace to have despaired of a cause 
which its leaders had given up. After the suicide of 
Brutus and Cassius the continuance of the contest was 
hopeless; and Horace may in his short military career have 
seen, in the jealousy and selfish ambition of many of his 
party, enough to make him suspicious of success, even if 
that had been attainable. Republicans who sneered at the 
freedman's son were not likely to found any system of 
liberty worthy of the name. 

When Horace found his way back to Italy it was to find 
his paternal acre- confiscated. His life was spared, but 
nothing was left him to sustain it but his pen and his good 
spirits. He had to write lor bread — Pattperta* impulit 



HORACE. 129 

audax ut versus facerem l — and in so doing he appears to 
have acquired not only considerable repute, but also suffi- 
cient means to purchase the place of scribe in the Quaestor's 
office, a sort of sinecure Clerkship of the Treasury, which 
he continued to hold for many years, if not to the close of 
his life. 2 It was upon his return to Rome that he made the 
acquaintance of Virgil and Varius, who were already famous, 
and to them he was indebted for his introduction to Mae- 
cenas. The particulars of his first interview with his patron 
he has himself recorded. 3 It is a curious circumstance in 
the history of a friendship, among the closest and most 
affectionate on record, that nine months elapsed after their 
meeting before Maecenas again summoned the poet to his 
house, and enrolled him in the list of his intimate friends. 
The event took place in the third year after the battle of 
Philippi ; and as the only claim of Horace, the man of 
humble origin and the retainer of a defeated party, to the 
notice of the minister of Augustus must have been his 
literary reputation, it is obvious that even at this early 
period he had established his position among the wits and 
men of letters in the capital. The acquaintance rapidly 
ripened into mutual esteem. It secured the position of the 
poet in society, and the generosity of the statesman placed 
him above the anxieties of a literary life. Throughout the 
intimate intercourse of thirty years which ensued there was 
no trace of condescension on the one hand, nor of servility 
on the other. Maecenas gave the poet the place next his 
heart. He must have respected the man who never used 
his influence to obtain those favors which were within the dis- 
posal of the emperor's minister, who cherished an honest 
pride in his own station, and who could be grateful without 
being obsequious. Horace is never weary of acknowledg- 

1 Epistles, II. ii., 51. a Satires, II. vi., 36. 

3 Satires, I. vi., 55, et seq. 



130 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

ing how much he owes to his friend. "When he praises him, 
it is without flattery. When he soothes his anxieties, or 
calms his fears, the sincerity of his sympathy is apparent in 
the warmth of his words. When he resists his patron's 
wishes, he is firm without rudeness. When he sports with 
his foibles, he is familiar without the slightest shade of im- 
pertinence. 

By Maecenas Horace was introduced to Octavius, most 
probably soon after the period just referred to. In a. u. 
C. 717, a year after Horace had been admitted into the 
circle of his friends, Maecenas went to Brundusium, charged 
by Octavius to negotiate a treaty with Marcus Antonius. 
On this journey he was accompanied by Horace, who lias 
left a graphic record of its incidents. 1 It is probable that 
on this occasion or about this time the poet was brought to 
the notice of the future emperor. Between the time of his 
return from this journey and the year 722, Horace, who had 
in the mean time given to the world many of his poems, in- 
cluding the ten Satires of the first book, received from Mae- 
cenas the gift of the Sabine farm, which at once afforded 
him a competency and all the pleasures of a country life. 
The gift was a slight one for Maecenas to bestow, but he no 
doubt made it as the fittest and most welcome which he 
could have offered to his friend. It made Horace happy. 
It gave him leisure and amusement, and opportunities for 
that calm intercourse with nature which he " needed for his 
spirit's health." Never was a gift better bestowed or better 
requited. It at once prompted much of that poetry which 
has made Ma-eenas famous, and has afforded ever new 
delight to successive generations. The Sabine farm was >it- 
uated in a romantic valley about fifteen miles from Tibur 
(Tivoli), and among its other charms, possessed the valuable 
attraction for Horace, that it was within an easy distance of 

1 Satires, 1. v. 



HORACE. 131 

Rome. When his spirits wanted the stimulus of society or 
the bustle of the capital, which they often did, his ambling 
mule could speedily convey him thither; and when jaded 
on the other hand by 

" The noise, and strife, and questions wearisome, 
And the vain splendors of imperial Rome," 

he could by the same easy means of transport, in a few 
hours bury himself among the hills, and there, under the 
shadow of his favorite Lucretilis, or by the banks of the 
Digentia, either stretch himself to dream upon the grass, 
lulled by the murmurs of the stream, or look after the cul- 
ture of his fields, and fancy himself a farmer. The site of 
this farm has been pretty accurately ascertained, and it is 
at the present day a favorite resort of travellers, especially 
of Englishmen, who visit it in such numbers, and trace its 
features with so much enthusiasm, that the resident peas- 
antry, " who cannot conceive of any other source of in- 
terest in one so long dead and unsainted, than that of co-pa- 
triotism or consanguinity," believe Horace to have been 
an Englishman. 1 The property was of moderate size, and 
produced corn, olives, and wine, but was not highly culti- 
vated. Here Horace spent a considerable part of every 
year. Latterly, when his health failed, he passed the win- 
ter in the milder air of a villa at Tivoli. The Sabine farm 
was very retired, being about four miles from Varia (Vico 
Varo), the nearest town, well covered with timber, and 
traversed by a small but sparkling stream. It gave em- 
ployment to five families of free coloni, who were under the 
superintendence of a bailiff; and, besides these, eight slaves 
were attached to the poet's establishment. With his inex- 
pensive habits this little property was sufficient for all his 
wants (Satis beatus unicis Sabinis). Here he could enter- 

1 Letter by Mr. Dennis. — Milman's Horace, London, 1849, p. 109. 



132 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

tain a stray friend from town, — his patron Maecenas, upon 
occasion, — and the delights of this agreeable retreat and 
the charm of the poet's society, were doubtless more than a 
compensation for the plain fare or the thin home-grown 
wine, Vile Sabinum, with which its resources alone enabled 
him to regale them. 

The life of Horace from the time of his intimacy with 
Maecenas appears to have been one of comparative ease 
and of great social enjoyment. Augustus soon admitted 
him to his favor, and sought to attach him to his person in 
the capacity of secretary. This offer Horace was prudent 
and firm enough to decline ; while at the same time he had 
the tact not to offend the master of the world by his re- 
fusal. To the close of his life his favor at court continued 
without a cloud. Augustus not only liked the man, but 
entertained a profound admiration for the poet. Believing 
in the immortality of his writings, it was natural the em- 
peror should cultivate the good-will and seek to secure the 
"deathless meed" of his favorite's song. That Horace had 
fought with Brutus against him was no prejudice. To have 
espoused the cause, and enjoyed the confidence of one 
whose nobility of purpose his adversaries never scrupled to 
acknowledge, formed, indeed, in itself a claim upon his suc- 
cessful rival's esteem. Horace was no renegade ; he was 
not ashamed of the past, and Maecenas and Augustus wore 
just the men to respect him for his independence, and to 
like him the better for it. They could appreciate his supe- 
riority to the herd of time-servers around them ; and like 
all the greatest actors on the political stage, they were above 
the petty rancors of party jealousy, or the desire to enforce 
a renunciation of convictions opposite to their own. It was 
by never BtOOping to them unduly that Horace 1 secured their 
esteem, and maintained himself upon a footing of equality 
with them as nearly as the difference of rank would allow. 
There is no reason to suspect Horace, in the praises which 



HORACE. 133 

he has recorded of Augustus, either of ^insincerity or syco- 
phancy. He was able to contrast the comparative security 
of life and property, the absence of political turmoil, and 
the development of social ease and happiness, which his 
country enjoyed under the masterly administration of Au- 
gustus, with the disquietudes and strife under which it had 
languished for so many years. The days of a republic had 
gone by, and an enlightened despotism must have been wel- 
comed by a country shaken by a long period of civil commo- 
tion, and sick of seeing itself played for as the stake of 
reckless and ambitious men. He was near enough to the 
councils of the world's master to see his motives and to 
appreciate his policy ; and his intimate personal intercourse 
with both Augustus and Maecenas no doubt enabled him to 
do fuller justice both to their intentions and their capacity, 
than was possible perhaps to any other man of his time. 
The envy which his intimacy with these two foremost 
men of all the world for a time excited in Roman so- 
ciety by degrees gave way, as years advanced, and the 
causes of their esteem came to be better understood. Their 
favor did not spoil him. He was ever the same kindly, 
urbane, and simple man of letters he had originally been. 
He never presumed upon his position, or looked super- 
ciliously on others less favored than himself. At all times 
generous and genial, years only mellowed his wisdom, and 
gave a sharper lustre to the beauty of his verse. 

The unaffected sincerity of his nature, and the rich vein 
of his genius, made him courted by the rich and noble. 1 
He mixed on easy terms with the choicest society of Rome, 
and what a society must that have been which included 
Virgil, Varius, Plotius, Tibullus, Pollio, and a host of others, 
who were not only ripe scholars, but had borne and were 
bearing a leading part in the great actions and events of 

1 Odes, II. xvii., 9, et seq. 
12 



134 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

that memorable epoch ? It is to this period that the compo- 
sition of his principal odes is to be attributed. To these, 
of all his writings, Horace himself ascribed the greatest 
value, and on these he rested his claims to posthumous fame. 
They were the result of great labor, as he himself indicates : 
" Operosa parvus Carmina fingo," 1 and yet they bear preemi- 
nently the charm of simplicity and ease. He was the 
first to mould the Latin tongue to the Greek lyric measures ; 
and his success in this difficult task may be estimated from 
the fact, that as he was the first so was he the greatest of 
the Roman lyrists. Quinctilian's criticism upon him can 
scarcely be improved : " Lyricorum Horatius fere solus 
legi dignus. Nam et insurgit aliquando, et plenus est ju- 
cunditatis et gratiae, et variis figuris, et verbis felicissime 
audax." In this airy and playful grace, in happy epithets, 
in variety of imagery, and exquisite felicity of expression, 
the Odes are still unsurpassed among the writings of any 
period or language. If they want the inspiration of a great 
motive or the fervor and resonance of the finest lyrics of 
Greece, they possess at all events an exquisite grace and 
terseness of expression, a power of painting an image or 
expressing a thought in the fewest and fittest words, and a 
melody of tone, which imbue them with a charm quite 
peculiar, and have given them a hold upon the minds of 
educated men, which no change of taste has shaken. That 
they are inferior to his Greek models is not to be wondered 
at. Even although Horace had possessed the genius of 
Pindar or Sappho, it is doubtful whether, writing in an arti- 
ficial language, which he was compelled to make more 
artificial by the adoption of Grecian terms of expression, 
and being therefore without the free and genial medium of 
expression which they had at command, he could have 
found an adequate utterance for his inspiration. But his 

i Odes, IV. h\, 31. 



HORACE. 135 

genius was akin to neither of these ; and that good sense, 
which is his great characteristic, withheld him from ever 
either soaring too high or attempting to sustain his flight too 
long. He knew the measure of his powers, and in his 
greatest efforts, therefore, no undue strain upon them is to 
be detected. His power of passion is limited, and his 
strokes of pathos are few and slight. Above all, he did 
not possess the faculty, which, in a lyrical writer, is the 
highest, of losing himself in a great theme. Whatever 
subject he treats, we never lose sight of the poet in the 
poem. This quality, while it is fatal to lyric poetry of the 
highest class, helps, however, to heighten the charm of 
the mass of his odes, especially those which are devoted to 
his friends, or which breathe the delight with which the 
contact with the ever fresh beauties of natural scenery 
inspired him. Into these he throws his whole heart, and in 
them we feel the fascination which made him beloved by 
those who came within the circle of his personal influence, 
and which makes him as it were the well known and inti- 
mate friend of all to whom his writings are a familiar study. 
Horace was not and could not have been a national poet. 
He wrote only for cultivated men, and under the shadow of 
a court. The very language in which he wrote must have 
been unintelligible to the people, and he had none of those 
popular sympathies which inspire the lyrics of Burns or 
Beranger. The Roman population of his time was perhaps 
as little likely to command his respect as any which the 
world has ever seen ; and there was no people, in the sense 
in which we understand the word, to appeal to. And yet 
Horace has many points in common with Burns. " A man 's 
a man for a' that," in the whole vein of its sentiment is 
thoroughly Horatian ; but the glow which kindles the heart 
and fires the brain is subdued to a temperate heat in the 
gentler and physically less energetic nature of Horace. In 
his amatory verses the same distinction is visible. None 



136 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

of his erotic poems are vivified by those gushes of emotion 
which animate the love poetry of the poets we have named, 
and of other modern song writers. Never indeed was love 
less ideal or intense in a poet of unquestionable power. 
Horace is not insensible to beauty. No writer hits off with 
greater neatness the portrait of a beauty, or conjures up 
more skilfully before his reader an image of seductive grace. 
But the fire of genuine passion is wanting. Horace's ardor 
seems never to have risen above the transient flush of 
desire. His heart is whole though Cupid may have clapped 
him on the shoulder. The Lalages and Lyces, the Glyceras 
and Phrynes of his Odes are pretty playthings of an hour, 
who amused his fancy and delighted his senses, but never 
robbed him of a night's repose or of a day's appetite. The 
attempt to make them out as real objects of attachment, is 
one of the many follies in which his commentators have 
wasted much dreary labor. Horace might, no doubt, have 
sung of himself, like Beranger, in his youth, — 

" J'avais vingt ans unc folic maitresse, 
Des francs amis, et 1'amour de chansons," — 

and even when he could count eight lustres, despite his own 
protest, 1 his senses were probably not dead to the attractions 
of a fine ankle, or a pretty face, or to the fascinations of a 
sweet smile, or a musical voice. But his passions were too 
well controlled, and his love of ease too strong, to have 
admitted of so many flirtations as would be implied in the 
supposition that Tyndaris, Myrtale, and a score of others, 
were actual favorites of the bard. To sing of beauty has 
always been the poet's privilege and delight; and to record 
the lover's pains an easy and popular theme. Horace, the 
wit and friend of wits, was not likely to be out of the mode, 

1 Odes, II. -4, '21. d tog. 



HORACE. 137 

and so he sang of love and beauty according to his fashion. 
Very airy and playful and pleasant is that fashion, and, for 
his time, in the main comparatively pure and chaste ; but 
we seek in vain for the tenderness, the negation of selfj and 
the pathos, which are the soul of all true love poetry. 
" His love ditties," it has been well said, " are, as it were, 
like flowers, beautiful in form, and rich in hues, but with- 
out the scent that breathes to the heart." It is certain 
that many of them are merely imitations of Greek originals. 
His Satires and Epistles are less read, yet they are per- 
haps more intrinsically valuable than his lyric poetry. 
They are of very various merit, written at different periods 
of his life, and although the order of their composition may 
be difficult to define with certainty, much may be inferred, 
even from the internal evidence of style and subject, as to 
the development of the poet's genius. This subject has 
engaged much of the attention of the commentators, and all 
concur in placing the Satires first, and the Epistles, includ- 
ing the Epistle to the Pisos, De Arte Poeticd, last in the 
order of date. . As reflecting " the age and body of the 
time," they possess the highest historical value. Through 
them the modern scholar is able to form a clearer idea of 
the state of society in Rome in the Augustan age than of any 
other phase of social development in the history of nations. 
Mingling, as he did, freely with men of all ranks and pas- 
sions, and himself untouched by the ambition of wealth or 
influence which absorbed them in the struggle of society, 
he enjoyed the best of opportunities for observation, and he 
used them diligently. Horace's observation of character 
is subtle and exact, his knowledge of the heart is profound, 
his power of graphic delineation great; a genial humor 
plays over his verses, and a kindly wisdom dignifies them. 
Never were the maxims of social prudence and practipal 
good sense inculcated in so pleasing a form as in the Epistles, 
The vein of his satire is delicate yet racy, and he stimulates 

12* 



138 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

and amuses, but rarely offends by indelicacy, or outrages 
by coarseness. He does not spare himself upon occasion. 

His sarcasms, moreover, have no spice of malignity, 
neither are they tinged by the satirist's vice of vaunting 
his superiority to his neighbors. For fierceness of invec- 
tive, or loftiness of moral tone he is inferior to Juvenal ; but 
the vices of his time were less calculated to provoke the 
" saeva indignatio," or to call for the stern moral censure 
of the satirist of a more recent date. He deals rather with 
the weakness and follies, than with the vices or crimes of 
mankind, and his appeals are directed to their judgment and 
practical sense rather than to their conscience. The idea 
of duty or absolute right is not a prominent one with 
Horace. He inculcates what is fitting and decorous, and 
tends most to tranquillity of mind and body, rather than the 
severe virtues of a high standard of moral purity. To live 
at peace with the world, to shun the extremes of avarice, 
luxury, and ambition, to outrage none of the laws of nature, 
to enjoy life wisely, and not to load it with cares which the 
lapse of a few brief years will demonstrate to be foolishness, 
is very nearly the sum of his philosophy. Of religion, as 
we understand it, he had little. He was, however, too 
observant of the world around him, and too habitually ac- 
customed to look into his own soul, not to have been pro- 
foundly impressed with the evidences of Supreme Wisdom 
governing the machine of the universe, and to have felt as- 
pirations for a future in which the mysteries of the present 
world should find a solution. Although himself little of a 
practical worshipper — parens deonun eultor et infrequens — 
he respected the sincerity of others in their belief in the old 
gods. Hut in common with the more vigorous intellects of 
the time, he had outgrown the effete creed oi' his country- 
men. He could not accept the mythology, about which the 
forms of the contemporary worship still clustered. The rela- 
tion of the universe to its Maker was a mystery to him, and 



HORACE. 139 

the agency of an active Providence, if it occasionally 
startled him out of the easy indifference of a vain philoso- 
phy, seems to have been by no means a permanent convic- 
tion of his mind, influencing his actions, or giving a lofty 
sweep to his speculations. The morality of enlightened 
and far-seeing wisdom was attainable by such a mind, and 
it was attained ; but to the divine spirit, which raised some of 
the ancient writers almost to a level with the inspired au- 
thors of the books of our faith, Horace has no claim. As a 
living and brilliant commentary on life, as a storehouse of 
maxims of practical wisdom, couched in language the most 
apt and concise, as sketches of men and manners, which will 
be always fresh and always true, because they were true 
once, and because human nature will always reproduce itself 
under analogous circumstances, his Satires, and still more 
his Epistles, will have a permanent value for mankind. In 
these, too, as in his Odes, Horace helped materially in giv- 
ing to the Latin language the highest amount of polish of 
which it is susceptible. 

At no time very robust, Horace's health appears to have 
declined some years before his death. He was doomed to 
see some of his most valued friends drop into the grave 
before him. This to him, who gave to friendship the ardor 
which other men give to love, was the severest wound that 
time could bring. Youth, and spirits, and health, the inevit- 
able decay of nature, saddened the thoughtful poet in his sol- 
itude, and tinged the gayest society with melancholy. But 
the loss of friends, the brothers of his soul, of Virgil, Quinc- 
tilius, Tibullus, and others, and ultimately of Maecenas, with- 
out that hope of reunion which springs from the cheering 
faith which was soon afterwards to be revealed to the world, 
must have by degrees stripped life of most of its charms. 
Singula de nobis anni prcedantur euntes l is a cheerless 

1 Epistles, II. ii., 55. 



140 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

reflection to the man who has no assured hope beyond the 
present time. Maecenas's health was a source of deep 
anxiety to him, and one of the most exquisite odes (the 17th 
of the 2nd book), addressed to him, in answer to some out- 
burst of despondency, while it expresses the depth of the 
poet's regard, bears in it the tones of a man somewhat 
weary of the world : — 

" Ah ! if untimely fate should snatch thee hence, 
Thee, of my soul a part, 
Why should I linger on, with deaden'd sense, 

And ever aching heart, 
A worthless fragment of a fallen shrine ? . 
No, no ! One day beholds thy death and mine ! 

" Think not that I have sworn a bootless oath ! 
Yes, we shall go, shall go, 
Hand linked in hand, whene'er thou leadest, both 
The last sad road below ! " 

The prophecy seems to have been realized almost to 
the letter. The same year (a. u. c. 786, b. c. 8) witnessed 
the death of both Horace and Maecenas. The latter died 
in the middle of the year, bequeathing his friend, in almost 
his last words, to the care of Augustus : Horatii Flacci, ut 
met, esto mentor. On the 27th of November, when lie wa> 
on the eve of completing his fifty-seventh year, Horace 
himself died, of an illness so sharp and sudden, that he was 
unable to make his will in writing. He declared it verbally 
before witnesses, leaving the little all which he possessed to 
Augustus, lie was buried on the Esquiline Hill, near his 
patron and friend Maecenas. No trace of the tombs of 
either remains; but the name and fame o\' both arc inextri- 
cably entwined, and can only perish with tlu' decay of liter- 
ature itself. The fame of Horace was at once established. 
In the davs of Juvenal he shared with Virgil the doubtful 



HORACE. 141 

honor of being a school-rbook. 1 That honor he still enjoys ; 
but it is only by minds matured by experience and reflection 
that Horace can be thoroughly appreciated. To them the 
depth of his observation, and the reach of his good sense 
are made daily more apparent; and the verses which 
charmed their fancy or delighted their ear in youth, became 
the counsellors of their manhood, or the mirror which focal- 
izes for their old age the gathered wisdom of a lifetime. 
No writer is so often quoted, and simply because the 
thoughts of none are more pertinent to men's " business and 
bosoms " in the concerns of every-day life, amid the jostle 
of a crowded and artificial state of society; and because 
the glimpses of nature, in which his writings abound, come 
with the freshness of truth, alike to the jaded dwellers in 
cities, and to those who can test them day by day in the 
presence of nature herself. To Petrarch and Wordsworth 
he was a favorite study. Richard Hooker made him a 
manual. Louis XVIII. had him by heart; and there is 
scarcely a statesman of eminence in whose mouth his say- 
ings are not household words. 

There are no authentic busts or medallions of Horace, 
and his descriptions of himself are vague. He was short 
in stature ; his eyes and hair were dark, but the latter was 
early silvered with gray. He suffered at one time from an 
affection of the eyes, and seems to have been by no means 
robust in constitution. His habits were temperate and fru- 
gal, as a rule, although he was far from insensible to the 
charms of a good table and good wine, heightening and 
heightened by the zest of good company. But he seems to 
have had neither the stomach nor the taste for habitual in- 
dulgence in the pleasures of the table. In youth he was 
hasty and choleric, but easily placable; and to the last 
he probably shared in some degree the irritability which 

1 Juvenal, Satires, VII., 226. 



142 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

he ascribes to his class. At the same time, if his writ- 
ings be any index to his mind, his temper was habitu- 
ally sweet and well under control. Like all playful men, a 
tinge of melancholy colored his life, if that is to be called 
melancholy which is more properly only that sense of the 
incompleteness and insufficiency of life for the desires of the 
soul, which must be deeply seated in all earnest natures. 
Latterly he became corpulent, and sensitive to the severity 
of the seasons, and sought at Baias and Tivoli the refresh- 
ment or shelter which his mountain retreat had ceased to 
yield to his delicate frame. 

The chronology of the poems of Horace has been the 
source of much critical controversy. The earlier labors of 
Bentley, Masson, Dacier, and Sanadon have been followed up 
in modern times by those of Passow, "Walckenaer, AVeber, 
Grotefend, and Stallbaum abroad, and of Tate and Milfflan 
at home. As the subject is not one which admits of cer- 
tainty, the speculation is endless, and must always be in a 
great measure unsatisfactory. The general result may be 
stated as follows. The Satires and Epodes were first in the 
order of composition, having been written between the years 
713 and 725, after the return of Horace to Rome, and 
before the close of the civil wars consequent upon the defeat 
of Antony and his party. The two first books of Odes ap- 
peared between this period and the year 730. Then fol- 
lowed the first book of Epistles. The third book of Odes 
appears to have been composed about the year 735, the 
Carmen Seculare in 737, and the fourth book of Odes 
between 737 and 741. The second book of Epistles may 
be assigned to the period between 711 and 740; and to the 
same period may be ascribed the composition of the Epistle 
to the Pisos. The results of the speculations of Bentley and 
several of the leading critics arc presented in a tabular form 
in the admirable edition of Horace published by Pirmin 
Didot, Paris, 1855, with tin 1 commentary oi" Diibner, which 



HORACE. 143 

is a model at once of typographical beauty and editorial 
skill. 

For a list of the best editions of Horace, and of the 
numerous works on the topography and chronology of his 
poems, reference may be made to Smith's Dictionary of 
Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, London, 1850, 
sub voce Horatius. 

The translations of Horace into all the European lan- 
guages are numerous. The English versions are more 
numerous than successful. Pope and Swift, in their imita- 
tions, have caught more of his manner than any of the 
translators : and probably, the rendering which will convey 
the best idea of his peculiar charm will be that which hits a 
happy medium between the literal and the paraphrastic. 
The translation of Francis, which long held a place as the 
English representative of this classic, is a poor perform- 
ance, and is rapidly falling into merited oblivion. That of 
"Wrangham is weak, colorless, and trivial. Of late years 
many versions have issued from the press, among which 
those of F. W. Newman, London, 1853 ; Melville, London, 
1850; and Robinson, London, 1846-55; are chiefly re- 
markable. But a good English Horace is still a desidera- 
tum, and, if ever supplied, it will probably be the result of 
the combined labors of many hands. 



ROBERT HALL 



Robert Hall, one of the most celebrated writers and 
preachers England has produced, was born at Arnsby, near 
Leicester, May 2, 1764. His father was the minister of 
the Baptist congregation in that place, and the author of 
several religious publications, one of which obtained consid- 
erable popularity. His character has been sketched by his 
more celebrated son, from whose testimony, as well as that 
of less partial witnesses, he appears to have been a man of 
no little ability and worth. Nor was Robert Hall less happy 
in his other parent — his mother being a woman of excel- 
lent sense and eminent piety. He lost her when he was 
but twelve years of age (1776) ; his father lived to rejoice 
in his son's dawning fame. He died in 1791. 

Robert was the youngest of fourteen children. His 
infancy — like that of Newton, Locke, and Pascal, in whom 
the flame of life flickered as if it would go out almost as 
soon as kindled, while in the two last it but flickered all 
their days — was extremely sickly, and for some years there 
was hardly any hope of rearing him. As if to remind us 
how little we can anticipate the course of life, a full propor- 
tion of the great minds that have astonished and adorned 
the world, have come into it as if under sentence of imme- 
diately quitting it, with the worst possible promise of the 
great things they were destined to achieve. 

(H4) 



ROBERT HALL. 145 

Robert Hall's childhood was, as we shall presently see, 
unusually precocious — far more so than even that of most 
of the sons of genius ; nor was the promise of the bright 
dawn, so often delusive, clouded as the day went on. It is 
said that he learned to talk and to read almost at the same 
time ; his letters were assuredly learned in a strange school 
and from strange books, that is, in a graveyard, and from 
tombstones. The graveyard was adjacent to his father's 
house, and thither his nurse used to carry him for " air " 
and " exercise." Whether a cemetery be the best place for 
childhood to take its " airings " in, or epitaphs the best 
spelling-book, may be doubted ; but it was at all events a 
singular introduction to literature. 

Even at the dame's school, where he received his first 
formal instructions, he betrayed his passion for books, and 
was often found when school was over, in the above favorite 
but solemn " study " — the churchyard — engaged in soli- 
tary reading, though no longer poring over the tombstones. 
He pursued the same extra-official course of reading at his 
next school, which was kept by a Mr. Simmons, at a village 
four miles from Arnsby. He used to procure, it appears, 
from his father's library, books for these play -hour readings, 
and, doubtless, got more from his self-prompted studies than 
from any of his regular lessons. But the character of this 
" select library for the young " may well surprise us, and, if 
the fact were not well authenticated, his choice of favorite 
authors would seem incredible. Jonathan Edwards's Trea- 
tise on the Freedom of the Will, and Butler's Analogy, were, 
it seems, among the amusing " solatia " of his leisure hours ; 
and Dr. Gregory assures us that it is " an ascertained fact," 
that when he was about nine or ten, he had read and re-read 
these works with " an intense interest." Before he was ten, 
another incident evinced the tendencies of his mind to litera- 
ture ; he had composed, it seems, many little essays, and 

13 



146 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

often " invited his brother and sisters to hear him preach." 
Similarly, when he was once disposing in imagination (as 
children sometimes will) of his father's " goods and chat- 
tels" before the worthy man's death, he willingly agreed 
that his brother should have " the cows, sheep, and pigs," 
but "all the books" were to come to him. 

His early promise of eloquence, conjoined with religious 
sensibility, seemed to point to the sacred office ; and, in fact, 
his father indulged at a very early period some anticipations 
that the pulpit was his destination. At eleven he was re- 
moved to a school at Kettering, where the same brilliant 
talents were evinced, but not very wisely developed. His 
master, flattered by having such a prodigy, sometimes in- 
vited him to display his precocious powers of oratory before 
a "select audience," — a folly which the sound judgment of 
Robert Hall loudly and justly condemned in after-life. 
From this school he was removed to another of greater 
note at Northampton, kept by the Rev. John Ryland, a man 
of eccentric, but like many others of the same family, of 
unusually vigorous intellect. The energy of Mr. Ryland's 
character, and his original and impressive modes of teach- 
ing, seem to have given him a remarkable ascendency over 
the minds of his pupils, — and there can be no doubt that 
Robert Hall's intellect was greatly and healthfully stim- 
ulated under his judicious training. Here he remained 
about a year and a half, and then, having decidedly ex- 
pressed his predilections for the ministry, and pursued some 
preparatory theological studies under his father's roof, he 
repaired to the Baptist Academy at Bristol. This was in 
177S, when only in his fifteenth year. 

During his stay at Bristol, he Seems to have made rapid 
progress in all the studies which constituted the academic 
curriculum. His attention to the prineiples and praetie- 
composition was very marked ; though, as Dr. Gregory 



ROBERT HALL. 147 

observes, the few remains of his juvenile compositions ex- 
hibit " more of the tumultuary nourish of the orator than 
he would have approved after his twentieth year." This is 
a common case ; for a severe taste is, even in the highest 
genius, of slow growth, though in Robert Hall's perhaps as 
rapid as it ever was in any man. 

His debut as a public speaker gave but little promise of 
the brilliant career which awaited him. On being appointed 
to deliver an address (as the students were accustomed to 
do in rotation) at the vestry of Broadmead Chapel, he, 
after a brief but fluent exordium which excited the expecta- 
tions of his auditors, suddenly, but completely lost his self- 
possession, and covering his face in an agony of shame 
exclaimed, " Oh ! I have lost all my ideas." His tutor, 
confident (as Sheridan said after his own ignominious first 
appearance) that it was in him, and determined, as was 
Sheridan, that it should come out of him, appointed him to 
deliver the same address the following week ; not very 
judiciously, perhaps, considering the laws of association, 
and how apt is a sensitive mind, like a spirited horse, to shy 
and falter at the same spot. Sad to say, he again failed, 
and failed completely. Yet the incident was of value to 
him. While there was little fear lest a transient mortifi- 
cation like this should permanently depress a powerful 
mind, fully conscious of its powers, — indeed, such minds 
are generally stimulated rather than depressed by obsta- 
cles, — it had a salutary effect upon his moral nature. 

In relation to the sacred office he seems at this time, as 
Dr. Gregory observes, to have been too little sensible of its 
higher purposes, and too ambitious of achieving intellectual 
eminence ; perhaps also too conscious of his powers to 
achieve it. Some feeling of this kind is indicated by his 
own words, uttered after his second failure, — " If this does 
not humble me, the devil must have me!" Many other 
young orators who have afterwards attained eminence, have 



148 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

encountered similar disasters in their first attempts. The 
singularity in Robert Hall's case is that he had not been har- 
dened to self-possession by his previous juvenile appearance 
before those " select audiences," which his injudicious school- 
master had so early taught the young Roscius to confront. 

In the autumn of 1781, after staying three years at the 
Academy, he went, as an exhibitioner under Dr. Ward's 
will, to King's College, Aberdeen, where he remained till 
1785. Several of the professors were men of note, espec- 
ially Gerard and Leslie, while Marischal College could boast 
of the prelections of Campbell and Beattie. Hall pursued 
his studies in the departments of classics, philosophy, and 
mathematics, with like distinguished success ; being the first 
man of his year in all the classes. But the great charm of 
his residence at Aberdeen was the society of Mackintosh, 
who, though a year younger, had entered college a year 
earlier. The friendship which ensued, and which only death 
dissolved, was equally beneficial to both parties. With some 
points of dissimilarity there were more of resemblance. 
The instant regards of Mackintosh, according to his own 
statement to Dr. Gregory, were strongly attracted by Hall's 
ingenuous frankness of countenance, the mingled vivacity 
and sincerity of his manner, and the obvious signs of great 
intellectual vigor. He says he first became attached to 
Hall " because he could not help it." But daily intercourse, 
in which they studied together without rivalry, and inces- 
santly disputed without anger, — a true test of genuine at- 
tachment, — cemented their first casual predilections into a 
lasting friendship. " After having sharpened their weapons 
by reading, they often repaired to the spacious sands upon 
the sea-shore, and still more frequently to the picturesque 
scenery on the hanks of the Don. above the old town, to 
discuss with eagerness tin 1 various subjects to which their 
attention had been directed. There was scarcely an impor- 
tant position in Berkley's Minute Philosopher, in Butler's 



ROBERT HALL. 149 

Analogy, or in Edwards On the Will, over which they had 
not thus debated with the utmost intensity. Night after 
night, nay, month after month for two sessions, they met 
only to study or to dispute, yet no unkindly feeling ensued. 
The process seemed rather — like blows in that of welding 
iron — to knit them closer together." * Though they both, 
doubtless, often fought for victory, they yet always thought 
at the time that it was for truth ; and as Sir James strikingly 
said : " Never, so far as he could then judge, did either make 
a voluntary sacrifice of truth, or stoop to draw to and fro 
the serra Xoyo(xa%iag as is too often the case with ordinary 
controvertists." From these " discussions, and from subse- 
quent meditation upon them," Sir James declared that he 
had " learned more as to -principles than from all the books 
he ever read." In addition to their discussions over Berk- 
ley, Edwards, Butler, and other philosophers, they read large 
portions of the best Greek authors together — especially 
Plato. Such complete intercommunion of minds in the 
same studies — such mutual reflection of lights and constant 
collision of argument — must have been of incalculable 
benefit to both. By this sort of student-partnership, when, 
as in this case, minds are congenial, the results of reading 
may be more than doubled. During the last years of Hall's 
academic course, his friend was no longer at college, and his 
mind sought no " new mate." He spent the time in solitary 
study, and, as appears by his own confession, was much 
engaged in devotion and religious meditation. He took his 
degree of A. M. in 1785. 

The six months' vacation of the two last sessions at Aber* 
deen had been spent in assisting Dr. Evans at Broadmead 
Chapel, Bristol. He now formally entered on the office 
of assistant-preacher, and about the same time was appointed 
to the classical tutorship in the Bristol Academy. This office, 

} Gregory's Memoir, p. 15, 
13* 



150 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

assumed at the early age of twenty-one, he discharged with 
great credit to himself and benefit to his pupils for more 
than five years. 

Of his preaching at this early period, an interesting ac- 
count is given by Dr. Gregory, to which we can only refer 
the reader. His favorite model for a short time was the 
original but eccentric Robinson of Cambridge, and, fascinated 
with his manner, he resolved, not very judiciously, to imitate 
it. One so original was little fitted to be an imitator of any- 
body, and his good sense soon reclaimed him from his error. 
The account he gave to Dr. Gregory of the mode in which 
he was cured of this folly is characteristic. " I was," he 
says, " too proud to remain an imitator. After my second 
trial, as I was walking home, I heard one of the congrega- 
tion say to another, ' Really Mr. Hall did remind us of Mr. 
Robinson ! ' That, sir, was a knock down blow to my vanity : 
and I at once resolved that if ever I did acquire reputation 
it should be my own reputation, belong to my own character, 
and not be that of a likeness. Besides, sir, if I had not been 
a foolish young man, I should have seen how ridiculous it 
was to imitate such a preacher as Mr. Robinson. He had 
a musical voice, and was master of all its intonations. He 
had wonderful self-possession, and could say what he pleased, 
when he pleased, and how he pleased : while my voice and 
manner were naturally bad ; and, far from having self-com- 
mand, I never entered the pulpit without omitting to Bay 
something that I wished to say, and saying something that 1 
wished unsaid ; and, beside all this, 1 ought to have known 
that for me to speak slow was ruin. ' Why BO? ' ' 1 won- 
der that you, a student of philosophy, should ask such a 
question. Von know, Bir, that force or momentum is con- 
jointly as the body and velocity ; therefore, as my voice is 
feeble, what is wanted in body must be made up in velocity, 
or there will not be, cannot be. any impression."' 

It seems that he some time afterwards met Robinson in 



ROBERT HALL. 151 

London, and young as he was, opposed in a public company 
some of the heresies which Robinson had then embraced. 
This he did so successfully that the latter, provoked out of 
his temper and good breeding, spoke with disdain of "juve- 
nile defenders of the faith." Hall was tempted to reply 
that " if he ever rode into the field of controversy he would 
at least not borrow Dr. Abbadie's boots," — a sarcasm in 
which there was a double sting, inasmuch as Robinson had 
at this time abandoned the very views which he had once 
" borrowed " Abbadie's arguments to defend. 

An unhappy misunderstanding with his colleague in 1789, 
and which threatened the peace of the church at Broad- 
mead, led to Hall's leaving Bristol. Before the close of his 
connection with that congregation, suspicions of heterodoxy 
on some points had been excited ; and in reply to certain 
inquiries he gave a frank and explicit statement of his 
views. To one or two singularities of opinion, which he 
afterwards abandoned, he pleaded guilty. He avows he was 
at this time a " materialist," but declares that his sentiments 
did not affect his theology, and that he wished his material- 
ism " to be considered a mere metaphysical speculation." It 
may be observed that in the same document, in which he 
fully avows his belief in the divinity of Christ, he makes no 
mention of his belief in the personality of the Holy Spirit 
— a doctrine of which at this time he was not convinced. 
His materialism he altogether abandoned in 1790 ; to the 
ordinary Trinitarian views he did not give his unqualified 
adhesion till some years later (1800). 

From Bristol Mr. Hall went (1790) to Cambridge, to the 
congregation over which Robinson formerly presided. After 
a twelve-month's trial of the place, he was invited to the 
pastorate, and accepted it. As no small portion of the con- 
gregation had been in various degrees infected with the 
errors of .their former minister, it has been well conjectured 
by Dr. Gregory that the very immaturity of Hall's senti- 



152 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

ments on certain points was an advantage rather than other- 
wise. They listened to him when they would not have lis- 
tened to a man of more strongly marked orthodoxy. As 
Hall gradually approximated to tire sentiments generally 
held by his co-religionists, he led his congregation with him ; 
and at length, by the force of his preaching, the influence of 
his splendid reputation, and the still better influence of his 
persuasive life and character, overcame all opposition to his 
ministry, and thoroughly weeded out the errors that had in- 
fested his flock. 

In 1793 he published his celebrated Apology for the Free- 
dom of the Press. The account of its origin is amusing. 
It seems that on this occasion he was " importuned into con- 
troversy," which, in spite of his unrivalled polemical powers, 
he ever avoided if possible. " And so, in an evil hour," 
says he, " I yielded. I went home to my lodgings and began 
to write immediately ; sat up all night ; and, wonderful for 
me, kept up the intellectual ferment for almost a month ; 
and then the thing was done. I revised it a little as it went 
through the press, but I have ever since regretted that I 
wrote so hastily and superficially upon some subjects 
brought forward, which required touching with a master- 
hand, and exploring to their very foundations." The esti- 
mate he formed of the production was, it must be confessed, 
sufficiently modest; for, as an exhibition of intellectual 
vigor, it is certainly equal to almost any tiling he ever pro- 
duced. It may be conjectured, indeed, from the more cau- 
tious political tone of his later publications, and the far dif- 
ferent terms in which, like his friend Sir James, he learned 
to speak of the French Revolution, that, had he written at a 
later period, he would have modified some of his statements, 
though he always declared his adhesion to the •'essential 

principles" asserted* The reasons he assigns in the above 
extract, hut, Still more, his ingenuously expressed regret for 
the "asperities" in which he had occasionally indulged in 



ROBERT HALL. 153 

this piece, would not permit him in his later years to consent 
to its republication, till the booksellers left him no alterna- 
tive. An earlier tract, entitled Christianity Consistent with 
the Love of Freedom, was impudently pirated, on paper 
which bore the watermark of 1818, with a title-page which 
bore the year 1791 ! It was, as Dr. Gregory says, " a very 
skilful imitation in paper, type, and date." 

An anecdote here may be worth relating, as showing how 
completely at this time he had resiled from Socinianism, 
into which it had been once suspected he was fast lapsing. 
His spirited eulogium on Dr. Priestley rekindled the hopes of 
some of that gentleman's partisans, and rendered on some 
occasions Mr. Hall's " denial " of any of the imputed ten- . 
dencies " imperative." " On one of these occasions," says 
Dr. Gregory, " Mr. Hall having in his usual terms panegyr- 
ized Dr. Priestley, a gentlemaa who held the doctor's theo- 
logical opinions, tapping Mr. Hall upon the shoulder, said, 
'Oh! sir, we shall have you among us soon I see.' Mr. 
Hall, startled and offended by the rude tone of exultation in 
which this was uttered, hastily replied, ' Me amongst you, 
sir ! Me amongst you ! Why, if that were the case, I 
should deserve to be tied to the tail of the great red dragon, 
and whipped round the nethermost regions to all eternity.' " 

In 1801 appeared one of the most eloquent and original 
of all his productions — the sermon on Modern Infidelity. 
A curious account of its preparation for the press is given by 
Dr. Gregory. Like most of Hall's sermons, it was deliv- 
ered almost entirely unwritten, though the matter, of course, 
had been profoundly meditated. The torture to which com- 
position exposed him from the mysterious disease in his back, 
quite indisposed the preacher to undertake the labor of pre- 
paring the sermon for the press. It was therefore procured 
in fragments from his dictation as he lay on the floor (a few 
paragraphs or pages at a time), and passed through the press, 
as his biographer assures us, without the author's having 



154 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

seen a line of it. Of its merits it is superfluous to speak ; 
as a luminous defence of some of the first principles of all 
religion, and a philosophical expose of the anti-social tenden- 
cies of infidelity, it has never been surpassed. It raised 
Hall's reputation to the highest pitch ; excited the admiration 
of men of all ranks and opinions ; conciliated the esteem of 
those who had been offended with the Apology ; crowded 
his chapel with throngs of university students ; and, per- 
haps a still better proof of its success, exposed him to the 
rabid attacks of Atheism and its champions. 

Two other discourses of surpassing excellence appeared 
in the course of the great struggle with France. One was 
entitled Reflections on War, preached on occasion of the 
"general thanksgiving" at the transient peace of Amiens, 
(1802). This, as Dr. Gregory surmises, was the only ser- 
mon Hall ever delivered memoriter, and the embarrassment 
he felt in some passages was sufficient to prevent him from 
ever repeating the attempt. The other was delivered on the 
renewal of the war (1803), and was entitled, Sentiments 
proper to the present Crisis. In spite of one or two rhet- 
orical flights, scarcely admissible in a Christian pulpit, it 
is deservedly considered one of the most extraordinary effu- 
sions of his eloquence. 

During the latter years of his residence at Cambridge 
this powerful and brilliant mind was more than oner tran- 
siently eclipsed. These accesses of mental disease were 
doubtless attributable to many causes ; partly to solitude, 
partly to excessive study, partly to the severe and harassing 
suffering in his back and the sleepless nights which it Occa- 
sioned, partly to severe disappointment, but principally, no 
doubt, to that which exacerbated all other causes of mis- 
chief — the exquisitely strung and sensitive mind which Is 
too often, as Dryden long ago observed. 



to madness Dear allied. 



And thin partitions do their bounds divid< 



ROBERT HALL. 155 

Just before his first attack (Nov. 1804), his severe sufferings 
from his old complaint induced his medical advisers to rec- 
ommend his living a few miles from Cambridge, and using 
horse exercise. Equestrian exercise would seem a question- 
able remedy, considering the local symptoms of his myste- 
rious disease, though country air might doubtless be bene- 
ficial. But whatever advantage this might secure was more 
than counterbalanced, it is to be feared, by the solitude to 
which his secluded residence doomed him, and which proba- 
bly much contributed to his mental attack. The retreat 
chosen for him was at Shelford, four miles from Cambridge. 
There he was engaged in solitary study and meditation dur- 
ing the whole day, and often deep into the night. The first 
melancholy attack took place in November, 1804. 

To the delight of his congregation, who had proved, by 
their provident care of him, their attachment to his minis- 
try, he was able to resume his public functions in April, 
1805. As it was feared that the associations of Shelford 
might prove prejudicial, he was recommended to change his 
residence, and most injudiciously, as it seems to us, he was 
again advised to reside in a remote village. He took a 
house at Foulmire, nine miles from Cambridge. Solitude 
once more proved his bane, and another attack soon super- 
vened. After a year spent under judicious medical care at 
Bristol, he recovered sufficiently to engage in occasional 
village preaching, and to apply moderately to study. But 
it was thought prudent that he should quit Cambridge alto- 
gether, and he accordingly sent in his resignation. 

Mr. Hall spent about fifteen years at Cambridge. Of 
his residence there — his studies, his modes of preparation 
for the pulpit, his social habits — an interesting account will 
be found in Dr. Gregory's Memoir, to which only a refer- 
ence can here be made. His biographer naturally dwells 
with partial minuteness on this period of Hall's history, as 
that in which he became intimate with him, and enjoyed 



156 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

unrestricted daily intercourse. It was that period, also, in 
which Mr. Hall achieved his great public reputation, and 
produced his most brilliant, if not his most useful, publica- 
tions. 

Leicester was the next scene of Hall's labors, whither he 
removed in the year 1806, and where he resided nearly 
twenty years, longer by some years than at any other place. 
In the limits of this brief article there is no space for de- 
tails, nor is it necessary. He lived as retired as his reputa- 
tion would allow him to be. If fame came, it came un- 
sought; if the world intruded upon him, as it often did, 
and often inconveniently, he gave it a courteous welcome, 
but was still better pleased when it left him to his studies 
and his flock. But much as he loved privacy, privacy for 
him was no longer solitude; in 1808, after a somewhat sin- 
gular courtship, he married, and, as it turned out, most hap- 

This event largely contributed to his welfare ; and it is 
observable that no symptoms of mental disease afterwards 
appeared. In relation to what he himself would consider 
the great purpose of his life, — the successful prosecution 
of his ministry, — the years spent at Leicester were the 
best of his life. However obscure might seem his lot, it 
was yet most happy ; for he was eminently useful, and uni- 
versally beloved. His chapel was twice enlarged to accom- 
modate the increasing crowds who thronged to hear him. 
Occupying a central spot in the kingdom, he was frequently 
importuned to preach, on public occasions, in all directions 
of the compass ; and, so far as his incessant and painful 
maladies permitted, he complied with such requests un- 
grudgingly. From time to time, and quite as frequently U 
the same physical infirmities allowed, he also gave the pub- 
lic the benefit of his pen. Besides several review.-, tracts, 
and other pieces, he published, during his residence at 
Leicester, some of his most celebrated sermons ; two of 



ROBERT HALL. 157 

them — on the Discouragements and Supports of the Chris- 
tian Minister, and on the lamented Death of the Princess 
Charlotte — are among the most striking efforts of his elo- 
quence. He here also published the largest, and in some 
respects most valuable of his writings — those on the Terms 
of Communion. These treatises are equally distinguished 
by acuteness of logic and catholicity of sentiment. It has 
been sometimes lamented that he should not have given his 
consummate logical powers a more ample theme. But, in 
fact, his genius has made the theme ampler than it seems. 
Not only have these pieces exerted a wide influence in 
liberalizing the opinions and practice of his own denomina- 
tion, but they abound in reasoning and sentiments of practi- 
cal application to every church in Christendom, and cannot 
be read by any thoughtful Christian without making him 
feel something of that noble expansion of soul which ani- 
mated their author ; without making him sigh for the day, 
when " every middle wall of partition " which jealous big- 
otry has interposed to the intercommunion of those who 
reciprocally acknowledge each other to be Christians, may 
be u broken down." 

On Dr. Ryland's death (1825), Mr. Hall was invited to 
Bristol, and, after a severe struggle, consented. It is 
scarcely a figure to say that he tore himself away from his 
congregation at Leicester. On the last occasion of cele- 
brating the Lord's Supper, he sat down, overcome with his 
emotions, and, covering his face with his hands, "wept 
aloud." To see the " strong man thus bowed," dissolved the 
people also in tears, — and so they parted ; his flock, as the 
Ephesian elders from Paul, "sorrowing most of all for 
the words that he spake, that they should see his face no 
more." 

Mr. Hall was in his sixty-second year when he removed 
to Bristol, and it was his last change ; thus terminating his 
labors where he began them. He was fast approaching the 

14 



158 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

close of his career. The mysterious and intractable malady 
which had so long tormented him, which had rendered his 
days and nights so " wearisome," became more urgent, and 
doses of opium almost fabulous produced little effect. The 
indirect effects of his complaint, — forbidding exercise, induc- 
ing plethora, and impeding the circulation, — produced that 
diseased condition of the heart which was the immediate 
cause of his death. The close of his life was a scene of 
frightful tortures, the sum of which, added to the almost 
constant pain in which his life was passed, must have been 
tantamount to many martyrdoms. The pages in Dr. Greg- 
ory's Life which depict his last sufferings, and the tri- 
umph of patience over them, form some of the most sor- 
rowful, and yet also some of the brightest, in the records of 
Christian biography. Deep were the clouds which gathered 
round his sunset, but they were all penetrated and trans- 
figured by the glory of the descending luminary ; and even 
he who doubts whether Christianity be true, can surely 
hardly read the closing scenes of this great and good man's 
life without feeling, that since humanity is thus subject to 
suffering, it is much to have such consolations. His death 
took place February 21, 1831. After detailing the appear- 
ances presented by the post mortem examination, the eminent 
physician, Dr. Richard, adds, — "Probably no man ever 
went through more physical suffering than Mr. Hall : he 
was a fine example of the triumph of the higher powers o\' 
mind, exalted by religion, over the infirmities of the body. 
His loss will long be felt in thi> place, not only by persons 
of his own communion, but by all that have anv esteem for 
what is truly great and good." 

The mind of Robert Hall was of that select order which 
are equally distinguished by power and symmetry : where 
each single facility i-> of Imposing dimensions, yet none out 
of proportion to the rest. His intellect was eminently acute 
and comprehensive; his imagination prompt, vivid, and 



ROBERT HALL. 159 

affluent. This latter faculty, indeed, was not so exuber- 
ant (as Foster justly remarks) as that of a Burke or a 
Jeremy Taylor ; nor could it have been so, without marring 
the harmony just mentioned. His reasoning was close as 
that of almost any controvertist of any age, but expressed in 
all the charms of a most chaste and polished style ; — severe 
logic clothed in the most tasteful rhetoric. His talents for 
the successful prosecution of abstract science, — especially 
metaphysical and ethical — were of a very high order ; but 
they were conjoined with strong practical sense, keen pow- 
ers of observation, and a vivid sensibility. His memory 
was tenacious, and his aptitudes for the acquisition of knowl- 
edge, generally, far beyond the ordinary measure ; but in 
him as in all very vigorous minds, diversified knowledge was 
but the material and aliment of original thought, and was 
subordinated to that wisdom which insists that it shall be 
the handmaid, not the mistress of intellect. His sense of the 
beautiful and the ludicrous seemed nearly equally vivid; and 
graceful imagery and pointed wit animated alike his writings 
and his conversation. His style is the very impress of all 
this amplitude and variety of endowments. It is masculine 
and compact, for a robust logic and strong sense form the 
basis of it; energetic and vivacious, for it is animated by 
imagination and sensibility ; polished and elegant, for taste, 
exquisite, sometimes even to a morbid fastidiousness, pre- 
sided over it. 

On the whole, minds of greater powers in several given 
directions, or of more absolute originality in some one, may 
be readily pointed out ; some too more strongly character- 
ized either by rugged strength or imaginative exuberance ; 
but seldom indeed has a mind appeared so variously dow- 
ered with all the choicest gifts of strength and grace in 
happy unison. 

It has been well said of his style by a critic in the Quar- 
terly Review, that it is " constructed after no model ; it is 



160 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

more massive than Addison's, more easy and unconstrained 
than Johnson's, more sober than Burke's." This is, in fact, 
one of its surpassing excellences ; it is eminently beautiful, 
but for that reason has no predominant features ; it is the 
just image of the happy conjunction and equilibrium of the 
author's powers ; — music in which no excess in any of the 
parts mars the harmony. 

If his more elaborate productions have a fault at all, it is 
the result of that very sensitiveness of taste to which refer- 
ence has been made. In polishing to an extreme of fastidi- 
ous elegance, he has perhaps here and there pared away a 
little of the energy of his style. For this reason it has even 
been conjectured that some of his strictly extemporaneous 
effusions, — extemporaneous as to the language, — to which 
he gave utterance in the all but preternatural dilation of 
mind, which sometimes characterized his eloquence in its 
prime, transcended in force and beauty his most deliberate 
compositions, produced as these always were amidst bodily 
sufferings little favorable to the free action of his faculties. 
In truth, his extemporaneous command of all the resources 
of language (equally seen in the pulpit and in conversation) 
was one of his most extraordinary endowments, and per- 
haps to the degree in which he possessed it, almost unique. 
Some may have been as copious in their diction, others as 
precise ; but he conjoined both excellences in equal meas- 
ure, and added to them, what is more rare, an astonishing 
command of construction ; so that he could throw the rapid 
and soluble words, which seemed to come at will, into the 
most apt and elegant collocations. 

This singular gifl of extemporaneous speech put the cope- 
stone on all his other excellences as an orator. The gen- 
eral structure of his mind, his robust reasoning faculties, his 
vigorous though ever ministering imagination, his keen sen- 
sibility, and his vehement passions, pointed in the Mime 
direction, and lilted him to be a great public speaker. Such 



ROBERT HALL. 161 

he would have become under any circumstances ; but it was 
his rare gift of extemporaneous language which enabled him 
to combine the immense advantage of unwritten composition 
with a freedom from all its usual defects ; to clothe, not ex- 
temporaneous thoughts indeed, — on which no man should 
reckon, though after careful preparation such thoughts may 
come unbidden, — but carefully meditated matters, in all 
the graces of the most eloquent language. His usual mode 
of preparation for the pulpit is thus described by Dr. Greg- 
ory : — " The grand divisions of thought — the heads of a 
sermon for example — he would trace out with the most 
prominent lines of demarcation ; and these, for some years, 
supplied all the hints that he needed in the pulpit, except on 
extraordinary occasions. To these grand divisions he re- 
ferred, and upon them suspended all the subordinate trains 
of thought. The latter, again, appear to have been of two 
classes, altogether distinct ; outline trains of thought, and 
trains into which much of the detail was interwoven. In 
the outline train the whole plan was carried out and com- 
pleted as to the argument; in that of detail the illustrations, 
images, and subordinate proofs were selected and classified ; 
and in those instances where the force of an argument or the 
probable success of a general application would mainly de- 
pend upon the language, even that was selected and appro- 
priated, sometimes to the precise collocation of the words. 
Of some sermons, no portions whatever were wrought out 
thus minutely ; the language employed in preaching being 
that which spontaneously occurred at the time ; of others, 
this minute attention was paid to the verbal structure of 
nearly half ; of a few, the entire train of preparation, almost 
from the beginning to the end, extended to the very sen- 
tences. Yet the marked peculiarity consisted in this, that the 
process, even when thus directed to minutias in his more 
elaborate efforts, did not require the use of the pen, at least 
at the time to which these remarks principally apply." 
14* 



162 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

So perfect was the form in which he could give expression 
to a train of thought, that (as already intimated) it may 
even be surmised that his spoken style often surpassed, in 
all the essential excellences of eloquence, that of the most 
admired and elaborate of his published discourses ; the for- 
mer having all the advantages of a more idiomatic diction 
and more colloquial construction, yet without the sacrifice of 
the precision and elegance which distinguish the latter. His 
frequent paroxysms of pain must at all events have tended 
continually to distract his mind, and diminished the glow of 
feeling when in the act of composition ; and hence the ex- 
treme reluctance with which he undertook the task. On the 
other hand, under the excitement of public speaking, the 
consciousness of painful sensations was less vivid, and some- 
times vanished, as appears from one of his own curious but 
most sad confessions. He tells us that he did not know that 
he was ever perfectly free from the consciousness of distress- 
ing sensations in his back, except now and then for a few 
moments in the pulpit. 

The same felicities of extemporaneous speech which 
marked his pulpit efforts were observable in private. His 
conversation possessed a vivacity, affluence, and elegance 
very rarely equalled. His repartees were particularly 
happy, and, as has been well remarked, strongly remind one 
of the manner of Johnson. Some of the pungent sayings, 
full of mingled wit and wisdom, which Dr. Gregory has 
recorded, make one regret that some Boswell was not always 
at hand to preserve those brilliant but evanescent effusions 
of his genius. 

Many have lamented that he did so little (compared with 
some other men) by his pen. In truth, however, consider- 
ing his constant Bufferings and the dreadful toil which com- 
position imposed upon him, his six octavos entitled him to 
be considered even a voluminous writer. 

Though, like most other men of powerful minds, he was 



ROBERT HALL. 163 

fonder of thinking than reading, his acquisitions were vari- 
ous, and, in several branches of study, profound. It may 
be added that his ardor in the pursuit of knowledge followed 
him to the last, of which Dr. Gregory gives us a singular 
example. He says that he found him one morning, in the 
closing years of his life, lying on the floor with an Italian 
grammar and dictionary, deep in the study of that language. 
To this he had been stimulated by an article in the Edin- 
burgh Review, in which an elaborate parallel had been insti- 
tuted between the genius of Dante and that of Milton. 
With this critique he had been, he said, much delighted, and 
wished to judge for himself of the accuracy of the views 
propounded. Among the many triumphs achieved by Mr. 
Macaulay's genius, it may be doubted whether any was ever 
more signal than that nearly his first Essay induced a mind 
like that of Robert Hall to study a new language at the age 
of threescore, just to verify the justice of the criticisms. 

It has been justly remarked by Mr. Foster, in his admi- 
rable critique on Robert Hall as a " preacher " (well worthy 
of universal perusal), that his eloquence in later years lost 
somewhat of the fire which characterized the oratory of his 
youth and manhood. But what was lost in this respect was 
gained in tenderness and pathos, in elevation of Christian 
sentiment and depth of Christian feeling. 

It is the crowning glory of Robert Hall that all his great 
powers were consecrated to the noblest purposes; sub- 
ordinated to objects better worth living for than intel- 
lectual power or intellectual fame. His sacred ambition 
was for the formation, in himself and others, of the Chris- 
tian character. To moral self-culture he sought, as all 
ought to do, but so few really do, to consecrate every en- 
dowment of his intellect. Of the possession of high powers 
he could not but be conscious ; and of the temptations they 
involved he was also profoundly sensible. His life shows 



164 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

us that lie had learned how to make 'them keep their 
place. Naturally impetuous, impatient, choleric, he sed- 
ulously watched over these infirmities in temper, and be- 
came remarkable for humility and simplicity ; full of ambi- 
tion, he submitted to cast down " every proud imagination ; " 
in his youth fiery and • pugnacious, he learned in his later 
years to hate controversy, and exercised in an eminent degree 
that charity toward all good men of all parties, which made 
him say in one of his sermons, " He who is good enough for 
Christ is good enough for me." In his manners he was as 
unsophisticated as a child, and in his conduct full of gener- 
osity and benevolence. His patience and fortitude were 
eminently displayed in the uncomplaining endurance of 
those frightful sufferings which made his life a perpetual 
martyrdom ; while his faith and humility were evinced no 
less in his admission that none of these pangs could have 
been spared. It has been well said by a writer in the 
Quarterly Review, " It is impossible to read the works of 
this extraordinary man without perceiving that his passions 
in his youth were turbulent in the extreme — that the ener- 
gies of his mind were then scarcely under his own control — 
that years of reflection and dear bought experience were 
wanting to him, above all men, in order to tame his spirit — 
that, like Milton's lion, he was a long time before he could 
struggle out of earth." "I presume." says he, in one of his 
letters, "the Lord sees I require more hammering and 
hewing than almost any other stone that was ever seleeted 
for his spiritual building, and that is the secret of his deal- 
ing with me." In a word, he exhibited the traits of a gen- 
uine Christian — his character shining witli a more lustrous 
light as he advanced in years, "growing brighter and 
brighter to the perfect day." 

The character to which he chiefly aspired himself, he was 
equally anxious to aid in forming in his fellow men, and to 



ROBERT HALL. 165 

this consecrated Lis genius as an object well worthy of it. 
Hence his contentment with a lot far more obscure than he 
could easily have attained in any department of secular life ; 
and hence, with Paul, he accounted it his chief glory to be a 
" Christian minister." 



SIR JOHN FRANKLIN 



Sir John Franklin, Rear-Admiral of the Blue, was 
a native of Spilsby, in Lincolnshire. Sprung from a line of 
freeholders, or " Franklins," his father inherited a small 
family estate, which was so deeply mortgaged by his im- 
mediate predecessor that it was found necessary to sell it ; 
but by his success in commercial pursuits he was enabled to 
maintain and educate a family of twelve children, of whom 
one only died in infancy. The fortunes of his four sons 
were remarkable, unaided as they were by patronage or 
great connections. Thomas, the eldest, following the pur- 
suits of his father, acquired the local reputation of an acute 
and highly honorable man of business, whose intellect gave 
him much influence with his neighbors, and in a time of 
threatened invasion, he was mainly instrumental in raising 
a body of yeomanry cavalry, in which he did the duty o( 
adjutant, and was afterwards chosen to be lieutenant-colonel 
of a regiment of volunteer infantry. The second son, Sir 
Willingham, educated at Westminster, was elected to a 
scholarship of Christ's Church, Oxford, and after gaining 
an Oriel fellowship, was called to the bar, and died a judge 
at Madras. James, the third son, having, as cadet, exhibited 
great proficiency in Hindostanee and Persian, was presented 
by the India Company with a handsome sword, £~>0 in 
money, and a eornetcy in the First Bengal Native Cavalry, 
(100) 



SIR JOHN FRANKLIN. 167 

in which he rose to the rank of major. He was noted while 
in India for his scientific knowledge, which procured him a 
lucrative civil appointment, but his advancement was inter- 
rupted by ill health, and after executing extensive surveys 
of the country, he was under the necessity of returning 
to England, where he died. His collections in natural 
history were highly appreciated by zoologists. 

John, the youngest son, and subject of this memoir, was 
destined for the church by his father, who with this view, had 
purchased an advowson for him. He received the first rudi- 
ments of his education at St. Ives, and afterwards went to 
Lowth Grammar-School, where he remained two years ; but 
having employed a holiday in walking twelve miles with a 
companion to look at the sea, which up to that time he knew 
only by description, his imagination was so impressed with 
the grandeur of the scene that former predilections for a 
sea life were confirmed, and he determined from thenceforth 
to be a sailor. In hopes of dispelling what he considered 
to be a boyish fancy, his father sent him on a trial voyage 
to Lisbon in a merchantman, but finding on his return that 
his wishes were unchanged, procured him, in the year 1800, 
an entry on the quarter-deck of the Polyphemus, 74, Cap- 
tain Lawford ; and this ship having led the line in the battle 
of Copenhagen in 1801, young Franklin had the honor of 
serving in Nelson's hardest fought action. Having left 
school at the early age of thirteen, his classical attainments 
were necessarily small, and at that period there was no 
opportunity on board a ship of war, of remedying the 
defect. Two months, however, after the action of Copen- 
hagen, he joined the Investigator discovery ship commanded 
by his relative, Captain Flinders, and under the training of 
that able scientific officer, while employed in exploring and 
mapping the coasts of Australia, he acquired a correctness 
of astronomical observation and a skill in surveying which 
proved of eminent utility in his future career. In the pros- 



168 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

ecution of this service he gained for life the friendship of 
the celebrated Robert Brown, naturalist to the expedition. 

In 1803 the Investigator having been condemned at Port 
Jackson as unfit for the prosecution of the voyage, Captain 
Flinders determined to return to England to solicit another 
ship for the completion of the survey, and Franklin em- 
barked with him on board the Porpoise armed store-ship, 
Lieutenant-Commander Fowler. In the voyage homewards 
this ship and the Cato which accompanied her, were wrecked 
in the night of the 18th of August, on a coral reef distant 
from Sandy Cape, on the. main coast of Australia, six- 
ty-three leagues, and the crews, consisting of ninety-four 
persons, remained for fifty days on a narrow sand-bank, 
not more than 150 fathoms long, and rising only four 
feet above the water, until Captain Flinders having made 
a voyage to Port Jackson, of 250 leagues, in an open 
boat, along a savage coast, returned to their relief with a 
ship and two schooners. 1 After this misfortune Captain 
Flinders, as is well known, went to the Isle of France, 
where he was unjustly and ungenerously detained a pris- 
oner by General de Caen, the governor. Meanwhile Frank- 
lin proceeded with Lieutenant Fowler to Canton, where he 
obtained a passage to England in the Earl Camden, East 
Indiaman, commanded by Sir Nathaniel Dance, commodore 
of the China fleet of sixteen sail. 

On the 15th of February 1804, Captain Dance had the 
distinguished honor of repulsing a strong French squadron, 

1 The Bridgcwatcr, another merchantman, was also in company 
with the Porpoise at the time of the wreck, and narrowly escaped 
sharing the same fate. The master of her, however, having on the 
following day seen the shipwrecked vessels from a distance, proceeded 
on his voyage to Bombay, where, on his arrival, he reported their 
loss. He did not live to explain his motives to those whom he thus 
deserted, for the Bridgewater never was heard of again after she left 
Bombay. 



SIR JOHN FRANKLIN. 1G9 

led by the redoubted Admiral Linois. Lieutenant Fowler 
assisted the commodore with his professional advice in this 
action, and Franklin performed the important duty of signal 
midshipman. On reaching England, Franklin joined the 
Bellerophon 74, and in that ship he was again intrusted 
with the signals, a duty which he executed with his ac- 
customed coolness and intrepidity in the great battle of 
Trafalgar, while those stationed around him on the poop fell 
fast, and were all, with only four or five exceptions, either 
killed or wounded. In the Bedford, his next ship, he at- 
tained the rank of lieutenant, and remaining in her for six 
years, latterly as first lieutenant, served in the blockade of 
Flushing, on the coast of Portugal, and in other parts of 
the world, but chiefly on the Brazil station, whither the 
Bedford had gone as one of the convoy which conducted the 
royal family of Portugal to Rio de Janeiro in 1808. In the 
ill-managed and disastrous attack on New Orleans, he com- 
manded the Bedford's boats in an engagement with the 
enemy's gunboats, one of which he boarded and captured, 
receiving a slight wound in the hand-to-hand fight. 

On peace being established, Franklin turned his atten- 
tion once more to the scientific branch of his profession, 
as affording scope for his talents, and having made his 
wishes known to Sir Joseph Banks, who was generally 
consulted by government on such matters, he set himself 
sedulously to refresh his knowledge of surveying. In 
1818, the discovery of a north-west passage became again, 
after a long interval, a national object, principally through 
the suggestions and writings of Sir John Barrow, secre- 
tary of the Admiralty, and Lieutenant Franklin was ap- 
pointed to the Trent, as second to Captain Buchan of the 
Dorothea, hired vessels equipped for penetrating to the 
north of Spitzbergen, and if possible, crossing to the Polar 
Sea by that route. During a heavy storm, both ships were 
forced to seek for safety by boring into the closely packed 
15 



170 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

ice, in which extremely hazardous operation the Dorothea 
was so much damaged that her reaching England became 
doubtful; but the Trent having sustained less injury, Frank- 
lin requested to be allowed to prosecute the voyage alone, 
or under Captain Buchan, who had the power of embarking 
in the Trent if he chose. The latter, however, declined to 
leave his officers and men at a time when the ship was 
almost in a sinking condition, and directed Franklin to 
convey him to England. Though success did not attend 
this voyage, it brought Franklin into personal intercourse 
with the leading scientific men of London, and they were 
not slow in ascertaining his peculiar fitness for the command 
of such an enterprise. His calmness in danger, promptness 
and fertility of resource, and excellent seamanship, as 
proved under the trying situation which cut short the late 
voyage, were borne ample testimony to by the official re- 
ports of his commanding officer; but to these characteris- 
tics of a British seaman, he added other qualities less com- 
mon, more especially an ardent desire to promote science 
for its own sake, and not merely for the distinction which 
eminence in it confers, together with a love of truth which 
led him to do full justice to the merits of his subordinate 
officers, without wishing to claim their discoveries as a cap- 
tain's right. Added to this, he had a cheerful buoyancy of 
mind, which, sustained by religious principle of a depth 
known only to his most intimate friends, was not depressed 
in the most gloomy times. It was, therefore, with full confi- 
dence in his ability and exertions that he was, in 1819, 
placed in command of an expedition appointed to travel 
through Rupert's land to the shores of the Arctic Sea: 
while Lieutenant Parry, who had in like manner risen from 
second officer under Sir John Hoss to a chief command, waa 
despatched with two vessels to Lancaster Sound, a missioo 
attended with a success that spread his fame throughout ihe 
world. At this period, the northern eoa:>t of America was 



SIR JOHN FRANKLIN. 171 

known at two isolated points only, namely, the mouth of the 
Coppermine River, discovered by Hearne, but placed erro- 
neously by him four degrees of latitude too much to the 
north ; and the mouth of the Mackenzie, more correctly laid 
down by the very able traveller by whose name the river is 
now known. On the side of Behring's Straits, Cook had pen- 
etrated only to the Icy Cape, and on the Eastern coasts Cap- 
tain (Sir John) Ross, in 1818, had ascertained the correct- 
ness of Baffin's survey, which had-been questioned, and had 
looked into Lancaster Sound and reported it to be closed by 
an impassable mountain barrier. To stimulate enterprise 
by rewarding discoverers, the legislature established a scale 
of premiums, graduated by the degrees of longitude to 
which ships could penetrate, but no provision was made for 
a pecuniary recompense to any one who should trace out 
the north-west passage in boats or canoes. 

Lieutenant Franklin, attended by a surgeon, two mid- 
shipmen, and a few Orkneymen, embarked for Hudson's 
Bay in June, 1819, on board of one of the company's ships, 
"which ran ashore on Cape Resolution during a fog on the 
voyage out, and was saved from foundering by Franklin's 
nautical skill. On reaching the anchorage off York Fac- 
tory, a large hole was found in the ship's bottom, but so far 
closed by a fragment of rock as considerably to diminish 
the influx of water. Franklin's instructions left the route he 
was to pursue much to his own judgment ; in fact, so little 
was then known in England of the country through which 
he was to travel, even by the best informed members of the 
government, that no detailed direction could be given, and 
he was to be guided by the information he might be able to 
collect at York Factory from the Hudson Bay Company's 
servants there assembled. No time could be more unpro- 
pitious for a journey through that land. For some years an 
internecine warfare had been carried on between the North- 
West Company, operating from Canada, claiming a right to 



172 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

the fur-trade from priority of discovery, and holding com- 
missions as justices of peace from the colonial govern- 
ment, and the Hudson Bay Company, which, in virtue of a 
charter from King Charles the Second, attempted to main- 
tain an exclusive authority over all the vast territory 
drained by the rivers that fall into the bay. Arrests by 
clashing warrants of the contending justices were frequent, 
might became right when the members of the two com- 
panies met, personal violence, seizure of property, and 
even assassination were too common, and in a recent fight 
at Red River twenty-two colonists of the Hudson Bay 
Company had lost their lives. Numbers also had perished 
of famine in the interior, owing to the contests that were 
carried on. When the expedition landed at York Factory, 
ihey found some of the leading North-West partners prison- 
ers there, and learned that both companies were arming to 
the extent of their means for a decisive contest next sum- 
mer. Such being the state of the country, a party coming 
out in a Hudson's Bay ship was looked upon with suspicion 
by the members of the rival company, and it was mainly 
through Franklin's prudent conduct and conciliating man- 
ners that it was permitted to proceed ; but sufficient aid to 
insure its safety was not afforded by either of the contend- 
ing bodies. Wintering the first year on the Saskatchewan, 
the expedition was fed by the Hudson Bay Company ; the 
second winter was spent on the " barren grounds," the party 
subsisting on game and fish procured by their own exer- 
tions, or purchased from their native neighbors ; and in the 
following summer the expedition descended the Coppermine 
River, and surveyed a considerable extent of the sea-coast 
to the eastward, still depending for food on the usual sup- 
plies of the chase, and often faring very scantily, or fasting 
altogether. The disasters attending the return over the 
barren grounds, on the premature approach of winter, have 
been told by Franklin himself in a narrative which excited 



SIR JOHN FRANKLIN. 173 

universal interest and commiseration. The loss of Mr. 
Hood, a young officer of very great promise, and who at 
the time of his death had been promoted to the rank of 
lieutenant, was especially deplored. The survivors of this 
expedition travelled from the outset at York Factory down 
to their return to it again, by land and water. 5,550 miles. 
While engaged on this service, Franklin was promoted to 
be a commander, and after his return to England in 1822, 
he obtained the post rank of captain, and was elected to 
be a fellow of the Royal Society. In the succeeding year 
he married Eleanor, 1 the youngest daughter of William 
Porden, Esquire, an eminent architect, by whom he had a 
daughter and only child, now the wife of the Rev. John 
Philip Gell. 

In a second expedition, which left home in 1825, he 
descended the Mackenzie under more favorable auspices, 
peac^ having been established throughout the fur-countries 
under the exclusive government of the Hudson Bay Com- 
pany, which had taken the North- West traders into partner- 
ship, and was then in a position to afford him effectual assist- 
ance, and speed him on his way in comfort. This time the 
coast line was traced through thirty-seven degrees of longi- 
tude from the mouth of the Coppermine River, where his 
former survey commenced, to nearly the 150th meridian, 
and approaching within 160 miles of the most easterly 
point attained by Captain Beechey, who was cooperating 
with him from Behring's Straits. His exertions were fully 
appreciated at home and abroad. He was knighted in 1829, 
received the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law from 
the University of Oxford, was adjudged the gold medal of 
the Geographical Society of Paris, and was elected in 1846, 
Correspondent of the Institute of France in the Academy 
of Sciences. Though the late surveys executed by him«? 

!ghe died in 1825. 

1-St 



174 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

self and by a detachment under command of Sir John Rich- 
ardson comprised one, and within a few miles of two, of the 
spaces for which a parliamentary reward was offered, the 
Board of Longitude declined making the award, but a bill 
was soon afterwards laid before parliament by the secretary 
of the Admiralty abrogating the reward altogether, on the 
ground of the discoveries contemplated having been thus 
effected. 1 In 1828, he married his second wife, Jane, sec- 
ond daughter of John Griffin, Esq. 

Sir John's next official employment was on the Mediter- 
ranean station, in command of the Rainbow, and his ship 
soon became proverbial in the squadron for the happiness 
and comfort of her officers and crew. 2 As an acknowledg- 
ment of the essential service he had rendered off Patras in 
the "war of liberation," he received the Cross of the 
Redeemer of Greece from King Otho, and after his return 
to England he was created Knight Commander of the Guel- 
phic order of Hanover. 

In 1836, Lord Glenelg offered Sir John the lieutenant- 
governorship of Antigua, and afterwards of Van Diemen's 
Land, or Tasmania, which latter he accepted with the condi- 
tion that he might be allowed to resign it, if, on a war break- 
ing out, he were tendered the command of a ship. He pre- 
ferred rising in his own profession, to the emoluments of the 
civil service. In as far as a man of independent political 
principles, of strict honor and integrity, conspicuous tor the 

1 Messrs. Dean and Simpson of the Hudson Bay Company, at a 
later period (1836-1839) completed the survey of 160 miles of coast 
line lying between the extreme points of Beechey and Franklin, and 
navigated the sea eastwards beyond the mouth of Back's Greal Fish 
River, proving the existence of a continuous watercourse from Bear- 
ing's Straits through 73° of longitude, as far eastward as the ninety- 
fourth meridian. 

2 The sailors, with their usual fondness for epithets, named the ship 
the " Celestial Hainhow " and " Franklin's Paradise. " 



SIR JOHN FRANKLIN. 175 

benevolence of his character, without private interests to. 
serve, and of a capacity which had been shown on several 
important commands, was likely to benefit the colony he was 
sent to govern, the choice was a judicious one, and did honor 
to Lord Glenelg's discernment. Dr. Arnold, no mean judge 
of character, rejoicing in the promise the appointment gave 
of a new era in the annals of colonial management, expressed 
the delight with which, had circumstances permitted, he 
would have labored with such a governor in founding a sys- 
tem of general education and religious instruction in that 
distant land. Sir John's government, which lasted till the 
end of 1843, was marked by several events of much interest. 
One of his most popular measures was the opening of the 
doors of the legislative council to the public, a practice soon 
afterwards followed by the older colony of New South 
Wales. He also originated a college, endowing it largely 
from his private funds with money and lands, in the hope 
that it would eventually prove the means of affording to all 
parties secular and religious instruction of the highest kind. 
At Sir John's request Dr. Arnold selected a favorite pupil, 
the Rev. John Philip Gell, 1 to take the direction of this 
institution ; but much opposition to the fundamental plan of 
the college was made by various religious bodies, and after 
Sir John left the colony the exclusive management of it was 
vested in the Church of England, with free admission to the 
members of other persuasions. In his time also the colony 
of Victoria was founded by settlers from Tasmania; and 
towards its close, transportation to New South Wales having 
been abolished, the convicts from every part of the British 
empire were sent to Tasmania. Up to the period of his 
quitting the government this concentration had occasioned 
no material inconvenience, neither was there at that time 

1 In later years he became Sir John's son-in-law, as mentioned 
above. 



176 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

any organized opposition to it. On an increase to the lieu- 
tenant-governor's salary being voted by the colonial legisla- 
ture, Sir John declined to derive any advantage from it per- 
sonally, while he secured the augmentation to his successor. 
In 1838 he founded a scientific society at Hobarton (now 
called the " Royal Society"). Its papers were printed at 
his expense, and its meetings were held in Government 
House. He had also the gratification of erecting in South 
Australia, with the "aid of the governor of that colony, a 
handsome granite obelisk, dedicated and inscribed to the 
memory of his former commanding officer, Captain Flinders, 
to whose discoveries we owe our earliest knowledge of that 
part of the continent of Australia. It stands on a lefty hill, 
and serves as a landmark to sailors. A magnetic observa- 
tory, founded in 1840, at Hobarton, in connection with the 
head establishment under Colonel Sabine at Woolwich, 
was an object of constant personal interest to Sir John ; and 
Tasmania being the appointed refitting station of several 
expeditions of discovery in the Antarctic regions, he en- 
joyed frequent opportunities of exercising the hospitality he 
delighted in, and of showing his ardor in promoting the 
interests of science whenever it lay in his power to do so. 
The lamented Dumont d'Urville commanded the French 
expedition, and Sir James Clark Ross the English one, con- 
sisting of the Erebus and Terror. The surveying vi 
employed in those seas during that period came also in suc- 
cession to Hobarton — namely, the Beagle, Captain AYiekham ; 
the Pelorus, Captain Harding; the Rattlesnake. Captain 
Owen Stanley; the Beagle (2d voyage), Captain Stokes; 
and the Fly, Captain Blackwood ; all of whom, with the 
officers under them, received from the lieutenant-governor a 
brother sailor's welcome. Thus pleasantly occupied, the 
years allotted to a colonial governorship drew towards a 
close, and Sir John contemplated with no common satisfac- 
tion the advancing strides of the colony in material pros- 



SIR JOHN FRANKLIN. 177 

perity; but he was not destined to be spared one of those 
deep mortifications to which every one is exposed, however 
upright may be his conduct abroad, who is dependent for 
support and approval upon a chief at home that changes 
with every party revolution. When Sir John was sent to 
Tasmania, England had not yet recognized as an established 
fact that the inhabitants of a colony are better judges of their 
own interests, and more able to manage their own affairs, 
than bureaucracy in Downing Street, with a constantly shift- 
ing head, ill informed of the factious oligarchies that infest 
colonies, and of the ties that connect them with subordinate 
officials at home. Previous to leaving England, Sir John 
was advised, and indeed instructed, to consult the colonial 
secretary of Tasmania in all matters of public concern, as 
being a man of long experience, thoroughly acquainted with 
the affairs of the colony ; and he found on taking charge of his 
government, that this was a correct character of the officer 
next to himself in authority. Mr. Montagu was a man emi- 
nently skilful in the management of official matters, but he 
was also the acknowledged head of a party in the colony 
bound together by family ties, and possessing great local 
influence from the important and lucrative situations held 
by its members, and the extensive operations of a bank of 
which they had the chief control. Party struggles ran high 
in the legislative council, and the lieutenant-governor's posi- 
tion was one of great delicacy, while the difficulty of his 
situation was vastly augmented through the practice of the 
officials in Downing street of encouraging private communi- 
cations on public measures from subordinate officers of the 
colony, and weighing them with the despatches of the lieu- 
tenant-governor. For some years, by Sir John's prudent 
conduct, the harmony of the colonial executive was not in- 
terrupted ; but at a later period the colonial secretary, hav- 
ing visited England, returned to Tasmania with greater pre- 
tensions, and commenced a course of independent action, 



178 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

ever hostile to his chief, subversive of the harmonious co- 
operation heretofore existing, and thus injurious to the 
interests of the colony, so that Sir John was under the 
necessity of suspending this officer from his functions until 
the pleasure of Lord Stanley, then secretary of state for 
the colonies, was known. Mr. Montagu immediately pro- 
ceeded to England to state his own case, and he did it with 
such effect that Lord Stanley, while admitting that the 
colonial secretary had acquired a local influence which ren- 
dered a his restoration to his office highly inexpedient," 1 
penned a despatch which is not unjustly characterized as a 
consummate piece of special pleading for Mr. Montagu, whom 
it absolves, .while it comments on the lieutenant-governor's 
proceedings in a style exceedingly offensive to a high-minded 
officer who had acted, as he conceived, with the strictest 
regard to the public interests. The extraordinary measure 
was also resorted to of instantly furnishing Mr. Montagu, 
then in attendance at Downing street, with a copy of this 
despatch, so that he was enabled to transmit it to Hobarton, 
where it was exposed in the Bank to public inspection. At 
the same time there was circulated privately amongst the 
officers of the colonial government and others a journal of 
his transactions with the lieutenant-governor, and of his 
private communications with members ot' Franklin's family, 
which he had kept for years while on terms of close social 
intercourse with them. This volume having answered in 
England the purpose for which it was intended, was now 
exhibited in the colony as containing an account of the sub- 
jects in which he stated he had held conversations with 
Lord Stanley. All this took place before the lieutenant- 
governor received official information of Lord Stanley's 
decision. The recovery of a document which had lain 

1 Lord Stanley's despatch, September 13, 1842. Mr. Montagu was 

promoted to be colonial secretary nt the Capo of Good Hope. 



SIR JOHN FRANKLIN. 179 

secluded in an office in the colony enabled Sir John after- 
wards more fully to substantiate one of the most important 
charges he had made ; nevertheless Lord Stanley refused to 
modify the terms he had employed, or to make any conces- 
sion calculated to soothe the wounded feeling of an honor- 
able and zealous officer. The arrival of a new lieutenant 
governor, the late Sir John Eardley Wilmot, bringing with 
him the first notice of his own appointment, and consequently 
finding Sir John still in the colony, served to show more 
strongly than could otherwise have been done, the hold the 
latter had gained on the affections of the colonists, and the 
verdict pronounced on Lord Stanley's despatch by the peo- 
ple, to whom all the merits of the case were most fully 
known. Sir John, after three months' longer residence at 
Hobarton as a private individual, waiting for a passage to 
England, during which time he received addresses emanat- 
ing from every district of the colony, was attended to the 
place of embarkation by the most numerous assemblage of 
all classes of people which had ever been seen on those 
shores, the recently consecrated Bishop of Tasmania J walk- 
ing at their head, along with the new colonial secretary, the 
late Mr. Bicheno, who for some months had acted in the 
greatest harmony with Sir John. A local paper, after de- 
scribing the scene in much detail, adds : " Thus departed 
from among us as true and upright a governor as ever the 
destinies of a British colony were intrusted to." Years 
afterwards, when the enthusiasm of party feelings could 
have no share in their proceedings, the colonists showed their 
remembrance of his virtues in a more substantial manner, 
as will be mentioned below. Sir John, on receiving the 
secretary of state's despatch, had tendered his resignation, 
but his successor was appointed before his letter could reach 

1 The erection of Tasmania into a see was promoted by Sir John's 
exertions and representations. 



180 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

England, though, as we have just said, his recall despatch 
did not come to Tasmania till some days after Sir Eardley's 
arrival. 

Owing to the fortunate rendezvous at Hobarton of the 
scientific expeditions and surveying ships above named, as 
well as many of her Majesty's vessels engaged in the ordi- 
nary service of those seas, the intrigues of the family faction 
and their supporters in the colony being matters of common 
discussion, became known to numbers of Sir John's brother 
officers, and a true estimate of the treatment he had received 
from the colonial minister was formed by the profession to 
which he belonged. He found, therefore, on reaching Eng- 
land, that the confidence of the Admiralty in his integrity 
and ability was undiminished, and this was speedily shown by 
his appointment in 1845 to the command of an expedition, 
consisting of the Erebus and Terror, fitted out for the fur- 
ther discovery of the north-west passage. With an experi- 
enced second in command, Captain Crozier, trained under 
Parry and James Ross from 1821 in the navigation of icy 
seas, a select body of officers chosen for their talent and 
energy, and excellent crew r s, in ships as strong as art could 
make them, and well furnished, Franklin sailed from Eng- 
land for the last time on the 26th of May, 1845. He was 
last seen by a whaler on the 26th of July, in Baffin's Bay. 
at which time the expedition was proceeding prosperously. 
Letters written by him a few days previously to that date 
were couched in language of cheerful anticipation of 
success, while those received from his officers expressed 
their admiration of the seamanlike qualities of their com- 
mander, and the happiness they had in serving under him. 
In the autumn of 1847, public anxiety began to be mani- 
fested for the safety of the discoverers, of whom nothing had 
been heard ; and searching expedition after expedition de- 
spatched in quest of them in 1848, and the succeeding years 
down to 1854, regardless of cost or hazard, redound to the 



SIR JOHN FRANKLIN. 181 

lasting credit of England. In this pious undertaking Sir 
John's heroic wife took the lead. Her exertions were un- 
wearied, she exhausted her private funds in sending out 
auxiliary vessels to quarters not comprised in the public 
search, and by her pathetic appeals she roused the sympathy 
of the whole civilized world. France sent her Bellot; 
the United States of America replied to her calls by man- 
ning two searching expeditions, the expenses of which were 
borne by Mr. Grennell, a wealthy private citizen of great 
humanity and liberality ; and the inhabitants of Tasmania 
subscribed £1,700, which they transmitted to Lady Frank- 
lin, as their contribution towards the expense of the search. 
In August, 1850, traces of the missing ships were discov- 
ered, and it was ascertained that their first winter had been 
spent behind Beechey Island, where they had remained at 
least as late as April, 1846. Yet in spite of every exertion 
by the searching parties, no further tidings were obtained 
until the spring of 1854, when Dr. Rae, then conducting an 
exploring party of the Hudson Bay Company, learnt from the 
Esquimaux that in 1850, white men to the number of about 
forty, had been seen dragging a boat over the ice, near the 
north shore of King William's Island, and that later in the 
same season, but before the breaking up of the ice, the bodies 
of the whole party were found by the natives on a point 
lying at a short distance to the north-west of Back's Great 
Fish River, where they had perished from the united effects 
of cold and famine. These unfortunate men were identified 
as the remnant of the crews of the Erebus and Terror, by 
numerous articles which the Esquimaux had picked up at 
the place where they perished, many of which Dr. Rae pur- 
chased from that people and brought to England. Point 
Ogle is supposed by this gentleman to be the spot where the 
bodies lie ; and this summer (1855) Mr. Anderson of the 
Hudson Bay Company, started from Great Slave Lake to ex- 
amine the locality, pay the last tribute of respect to the dead, 
16 



182 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

and collect any written papers that might remain there, or 
books and journals said to be in the hands of the Esquimaux. 
By considering the direction in which the party that per- 
ished were travelling when seen by the natives, and the 
small district that remains unexplored, we must come to the 
conclusion that the ships were finally beset between the 70th 
and 72d parallels of latitude, and near the 100th meridian. 
Two entrances from the north may exist to this part of the 
sea, one along the west coast of North Somerset and Boothia, 
which is an almost certain one ; and the other which is 
more conjectural, may occupy the short unexplored space 
between Captain Sherard Osborn's and Lieutenant Wynn- 
iatt's extreme points. To approach this last strait, if it 
actually exists, Cape Walker would be left on the eastern 
side of the passing ships. It is a singular and most melan- 
choly fact, that the very limited district of the Arctic Sea 
thus indicated, and which was specially adverted to in the 
original plan of search, is almost the only spot that has defied 
the exertions of the skilful and persevering officers who 
have attempted to explore it. Sir James Ross failed in 
reaching it ; it intervenes between the extremes of the long 
and laborious journeys made by Captain Sherard Osborn 
and Lieutenant Wynniatt. Dr. Rae's two attempts to en- 
ter it were frustrated by the state of the ice and other cir- 
cumstances, and Captain Collinson was also stopped short 
on its southern side by the want of fuel. Lady Franklin 
had sent out the Prince Albert for the express purpose of 
searching this quarter, but Mr. Kennedy unfortunately, in- 
stead of adhering to the letter of instructions, trusted to a 
distant view of the passage from the north, which seemed to 
him to be closed, and turning to the west, made his memo- 
rable winter journey through a space, which, though he 
was ignorant of the fact at the time, had been previously 
examined. 

With the utmost economy in its use, fuel would soon 



SIR JOHN FRANKLIN. 183 

become precious on board the Erebus and Terror ; and it is 
probable that after three years one of the ships would be 
broken up to furnish this essential article. Provisions could 
not last longer without placing the crews on short allowance, 
and to do so in that climate, subjected them to sure and de- 
structive attacks of scurvy. Fish and venison, it is true, 
might be procured in quantities sufficient to modify these 
conclusions, but not to a great extent : and, beyond all ques- 
tion, the numbers of the intrepid sailors who left England 
in such health and spirits in 1845, had waned sadly by the 
close of the season for operations in 1849. The forty men 
seen by the natives early in 1850, were doubtless the only 
survivors at that date. Franklin, had he lived till then, 
would have been sixty-four years old, but no one of that 
age was in the number seen by the natives. Had he been 
then in existence, he would have taken another route on the 
abandonment of his ship, as no one knows better than he 
the fatal result of an attempt to cross that wide expanse of 
frozen ground lying between the mouth of the Great Fish 
River and the far-distant Hudson Bay post on the south 
side of Great Slave Lake. Who can conjecture the reason 
that turned the steps of the weary wanderers in that direc- 
tion ? Perhaps the desire of solving the long-sought problem 
of a north-west passage, even then animated their emaciated 
frames, and it is certain that they did solve it, though none 
of them lived to claim the grateful applause of their country- 
men. Later in point of time, and in a higher latitude, Sir 
Robert M'Clure also, filled up a narrow gap betw T een pre- 
vious discoveries, and so traced out the north-west passage 
by travelling over ice that has in the five several years in 
which it has been attempted, proved to be a barrier to 
ships. If ever in the pursuit of whales, or for conveyance 
of minerals, commercial enterprise endeavors to force a 
north-west passage by steam, the southern route, whose last 
link was forged by Franklin's party with their lives, will un- 



184 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

doubtingly be chosen. And it is to be deeply regretted that 
the parliamentary committee in recommending the grant of 
public money to Sir Robert M'Clure, which his courage and 
enterprise so well deserved, should have omitted to mention 
the prior discovery made by the crews of the Erebus and 
Terror. 1 

This sketch of Sir John Franklin's character and public 
services has been written by one who served long under his 
command, who during upwards of twenty-five years of close 
intimacy had his entire confidence, and in times of great 
difficulty and distress, when all conventional disguise was 
out of the question, beheld his calmness and unaffected piety. 
If it has in some passages assumed the appearance of eulogy, 
it has done so not for the purpose of unduly exalting its 
subject, but from a firm conviction of the truth of the state- 
ments. On the other hand, the writer has abstained, in the 
only sentences in which it was necessary to speak of oppo- 
nents, from saying a single word more of their conduct or 
motives than strict justice to Franklin's memory demanded. 
Franklin himself was singularly devoid of any vindictive feel- 
ing. While he defended his own honor, he would have 
delighted in showing any kindness in his power to his bit- 
terest foe ; and in emulation of that spirit the preceding 
pages have been penned. 

1 Spars and pieces of rail recognized as having belonged to the 
Erebus and Terror were picked up by Captain Collinson near his 
wintering place in Cambridge Bay, and are sufficient evidence of 
currents setting in that direction, through a passage incumbered 
doubtless with drift ice. 



HOMER. 



Homer, the greatest epic poet of Greece, and a name of 
the highest significance, not with regard to Greece only, but 
to Europe generally, and to the history of the human race. 
For in Homer we have to do not merely with a poet of the 
first class, holding the same place in literature that Aristotle 
and Newton do in science, but with the oldest records, after 
the books of Moses, that have exercised a permanent influ- 
ence on the civilization of the West. It is but reasonable, 
therefore, that we should give a more full and minute con- 
sideration to the Homeric poems, than even the high position 
of their author on the topmost peak of the Hellenic Parnas- 
sus would justify. 

The life of Homer did not fall within the strictly histor- 
ical epoch of Greek literature ; nor were there any diligent 
biographers in his day who made it a business to collect and 
to make public the notable sayings and doings of men of 
extraordinary genius. The existing literary testimonies for 
the facts connected with the life of the poet, do not carry us 
further back than the age of Pindar (b. c. 500) ; that is to 
say, to a period more than three hundred years posterior to 
the age of the great poet, taken at the latest of the various 
dates to which it is assigned. What we know of Homer, 
therefore, we know only through the channel of national 
tradition, uncertain and vague as that must always be in an 
16* (185) 



186 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

age when writing was either unknown or little practised, 
and criticism of literary documents never dreamt of. "We 
shall not, therefore, be surprised to hear that even the birth- 
place of their great national poet was unknown to the Greeks, 
and that the period in which he flourished was a puzzle to 
their ablest chronologers. We are not, however, to suppose 
that on this interesting subject we know absolutely nothing. 
However vague popular traditions may be, and however 
discrepant in minor details, they will generally be found to 
contain a nucleus of truth which a practised eye can 
readily distinguish from the fabulous accretions of idle or 
impudent imaginations ; and if the general substance of such 
traditions regarding the life of a great poet, is not contra- 
dicted, or is rather confirmed, by the internal evidence of 
his reputed works, a reasonable man may take his stand 
upon them as confidently as he does upon any other conclu- 
sion, resting upon evidence which may reach the highest de- 
gree of probability, but can in no case partake of absolute 
scientific certainty. 

The authorship of the Lives of Homer, printed in Barnes', 
and other editions, and in "Westermann's collection, 1 is un- 
known : but their value as literary documents depends not 
on what the authors say in their own name, which is utterly 
worthless, but on the ancient authorities and special popular 
traditions which they quote. From them we know what 
was the account given by Aristotle of the birthplace of 
Homer, what Ephorus said was the local tradition of the 
people of Quins, and what Homeric monuments were shown 
by the islanders of Ios. A very slight consideration of 
these ancient testimonies thus analyzed will suffice to show 
the vanity of the claims put forth by various Greek cities 
as having given birth to Homer. Of these seven is the 
number commonly mentioned in a well-known distich,- but 

1 Mioyputpoi, Brunswick, 1845. - Aul. Ciell. iii., 11. 



HOMER. 187 

the reader who chooses to turn up Suidas will find at least 
half a dozen more ; and to increase learning in this matter 
will only be to increase skepticism, unless a man carries 
with him the sound maxim of the lawyers, — ponderanda sunt 
testimonia non numeranda. The claims of Athens, for in- 
stance, rest, according to a distinct testimony, 1 on the mere 
fact that the lonians of Smyrna were a colony from Attica, 
and that if Homer was a Smyrniote, he might reasonably be 
called an Athenian, just as a person born in Sydney may say 
he is a Londoner, because his father, or his grandfather, or 
his great-grandfather was so. In a similar loose fashion the 
claims of Salamis in Cyprus, are found to be explained by 
the fact that Stasinus, one of the poets of the Epic Cycle, 
was a native of that island, and that the epic poem called 
Cypria, written by him, was by some attributed to Homer, 
from whom Stasinus is said to have received it as a mar- 
riage gift with the daughter of the great poet. 2 Colophon, 
in a similar way, claimed to have produced the poet of the 
Iliad, because of a famous humorous poem called the 
Margites, of which Homer was generally supposed to be the 
author. 3 But the same critical inspection which enables us 
to expose the flimsy pretensions of these places, reveals the 
remarkable fact that those other cities which have most to 
say for themselves as being the native country of Homer, 
unite, by the peculiar form of their traditions, in giving to 
Smyrna at least some share in his birth, — a plain admission 
that at the time when these traditions were framed, the 
claims of Smyrna were considered so strong that they could 
not possibly be ignored. Thus the most detailed and best 
known Life, that attributed to Herodotus, which was for a 
long time received as authentic, deduces the parentage of 
Homer from Magnesia, in Thessaly; thence Melanopus is 

1 Lives 6 and e in "Westermann. 2 iElian, V. H. ix., 15. 

8 Welcker, Epic Cycle, i., 184. 



188 NEW BIOGRArHIES. 

said to have crossed the JEgean, and settled in Cumas, the 
principal city of the JEolians, in Asia Minor ; here he mar- 
ried a lady of Cuina?, by whom he had a daughter called 
Critheis; and this maiden having, unknown to her guar- 
dians, formed a connection with some unknown individual of 
the male sex, was, to avoid exposure, sent to Smyrna, where, 
on the banks of the river Meles, she brought forth Homer, 
thence called Melesigenes. We have already said that such 
local traditions are not history ; but when we find another 
of the seven cities, namely, Ios, framing a local legend, 
which, while differing from that of Cumae in every other 
point, agrees with it in bringing the immortal minstrel to the 
banks of the Meles to be born, we must be altogether blind 
to the spirit in which local legends are composed, if we do 
not see here the strongest proof that the real country of 
Homer was that which is distinctly allowed in the legends 
of those very cities which are most interested in denying its 
claims. We say, therefore, that according to all human 
probability, Homer was born at Smyrna ; and when we say, 
with equal probability, that he died at Ios, — one of the 
Cyclades in the Archipelago, for on this point the various 
accounts also agree, — we have stated all that can be said 
to be known with regard to the father of epic poetry in 
Greece. The other events of his life, as given in the larger 
biographies, are fictions invented, many of them, with the 
plain purpose of giving a historical existence to certain of 
the characters mentioned in the Iliad and Odyssey; or they 
are mere blunders of which the source is innocent and obvi- 
ous. That, like all minstrels, Homer was given to wander 
about from place to place in the exercise of his vocation, is 
probable enough without any voucher, and appears quite 
certain from the extensive and accurate geographical in- 
formation displayed in his works : but the details of his 
travels would be curiously retained in no man's memory;* 
and what we have for them bears all the marks of a vulvar 



HOMER. 189 

forgery. The mucli-bespoken circumstance of his being 
blind, noticed in all the ancient Lives, if implying a mere 
superinduced misfortune, and not a congenital defect, might, 
as a matter of popular tradition, be probable enough, were the 
origin of the story not too plain in the double fact that a 
blind poet is introduced in the Odyssey, 1 and in the famous 
hymn to Apollo, which Thucydides 2 and other ancients ac- 
cepted as the productions of the genuine Homer. This 
hymn, indeed, must be regarded as the main authority of 
those who claim Homer as a Sciote ; for the lines run ex- 
pressly, — 

TvtiXbg avrjp, oiku de Xtw evi Tcai7raloeaa7j. 

The blind old man who dwells in Chios' rocky isle; 

and there is certainly no evidence so strong in favor of 
Smyrna, provided only it could be proved — what no scholar 
now dreams — that these lines were really so said and sung 
by the veritable singer of the Iliad and Odyssey. But after 
this line is rejected, there remains no ground for the claims 
of Chios, save that weak one expressly mentioned by 
Strabo, 3 that in this city there flourished the famous guild or 
brotherhood of minstrels (of whom more anon), known by 
the name of the Homeridae ; a fact of no more power, when 
critically examined, to prove that Homer himself was a 
Chiote, than the fact of Calvinistic theology being very 
dominant in Scotland, would prove that the author of the 
doctrine was born in Edinburgh. 

The age of Homer is a matter about which less that is 
satisfactory can be stated than with regard to his country. 
That if not a Smyrniote he was at least a native of that 
part of Asia Minor, is proved not merely by the traditional 
evidence just adduced, but by the internal evidence of the 
poems themselves — by their rich tone, color, and style, and 

1 Odyssey, viii. 64. 2 History, iii. 104. 8 Strabo, XIV. p. 645. 



190 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

also by many well-known facts relative to the early rise and 
growth of poetic literature among the Greeks. But chro- 
nology is, in the nature of the thing, a matter with which 
popular tradition has nothing to do: and the internal evi- 
dence of the poems themselves on this head, though strong 
enough, perhaps, to exclude certain extreme suppositions, 
affords a pretty wide range to a merely .conjectural chronol- 
ogy. Herodotus, in a well-known passage, 1 places Homer 
about four hundred years older than himself; that is, in the 
year 850 b. c, or thereabout ; Aristotle, in the account 
given by him in the legend of Ios, makes the birth of Ho- 
mer contemporary with the great Ionic migration (104-4 
B. c.) ; while Dionysius of Samos, the cyclographer, threw 
him back as far as the Trojan War, which he de- 
scribes. To determine exactly between these contending 
dates, and at least a dozen more giv.en in a very full 
scheme by Lauer, 2 is of course hopeless ; but the circum- 
stances of the case warrant us in refusing to allow any date 
for Homer, so early as that assumed by the cyclographer, 
or later than that given by Herodotus. For such an ex- 
tensive collection of myths as that connected with the Trojan 
war requires time to grow ; and Homer manifestly talks of 
the heroes of the Iliad as belonging to some age not alto- 
gether identical with his own. The mingled elements. also, 
of Ionic and xEolic Hellenism, which appear in the Ho- 
meric poems, did not exist in Asia Minor, at the early date 
supposed by Dionysius, or those who conic near to him. 
As little, on the other hand, can we go beyond Herodotus, 
in bringing Homer nearer to the date of the Olympiads 
than the year 850, for the very uncertainty in which the 
wisest Greeks were as to the age of the poet, proves that lie 
lived at a period considerably more ancient than the lirst 
year (77(5 B. C.) of their recognized national chronology. 

1 History, ii., 53< '-' HonWtxhi I'vi.-it , p. 124. 



HOMER. 191 

Perhaps some reader may have been content that we 
should allude to these disputed points in a manner even 
more perfunctory than we have done ; but in these days of 
rampant historical skepticism, imported wholesale from Ger- 
many, it is absolutely necessary to make some attempt to 
mark distinctly where the cloud-architecture of mere imagi- 
nation ends, and the mainland of actual tradition, hazy and 
yet indubitable, commences. In reference to these skeptical 
views of the Germans, we cannot avoid noticing here that 
some of them have even gone so far as to deny the exist- 
ence of such a man as Homer altogether; and, what is 
of more - consequence to us, the language, which some of the 
more wild of that sect are still in the habit of using, has 
been adopted by some of our own scholars whose name is 
sufficient to make even their incidental errors dangerous. 
Mr. Grote, for instance, uses the following language: — 
" The name of Homer — for I disallow his historical per- 
sonality — means the Iliad and the Odyssey, and nothing 
else ; " and again, " Homer is no individual man, but the 
divine or heroic father of the Gentile Homerids ; " * that is 
to say, while the whole of the Greek nation believed they 
had once had a great epic poet to whose extraordinary 
genius, as to a natural and adequate cause, they attributed 
their two great epic poems (just as the ordered world finds 
the best explanation of its existence in a God) ; w r e, the 
learned of modern times, are bound to doubt whether that 
poet had any existence, and to treat these poems as if they 
were not productions of a great poetic genius at all, but the 
creation of some half dozen or a score of second-rate rhym- 
ers, whose names no person ever cared to know, but who 
were cunning enough to raise themselves into a fictitious 
historical consequence by the creation of a symbolical head 
of their corporation called Homer, whom the silly world 

1 History, Vol. ii., p. 179. 



192 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

has, for nearly three thousand years, been willing to take 
for a substantial reality ! Now, it ought at once to be 
granted to Mr. Grote, and those Germans whose nebulous 
notions he has, in this matter, imported, that there was a 
tendency in the earliest times of the Greeks, as perhaps of 
all highly imaginative nations, to represent in the historical 
form certain favorite ideas and theories, theological and 
ethnological; which allegorical or mythical narratives a 
modern reader of a prosaic temper may be apt to mistake 
for realities. Of the religious myth in particular, the his- 
toric was the generally accredited form, to such an extent 
that the original physico-theological ideas which these nar- 
ratives were invented to convey, are now but dimly discern- 
ible behind the motley company of human incarnations by 
which they are impersonated. Nay, more, it may even be 
true in some cases, according to a favorite notion of the 
Germans (Uschold and others), that the religious symbols 
of our century became the anthropomorphic gods of another, 
and dwindled down to the merely human heroes of a third. 
Further, it is not to be denied that beyond the sphere of 
religion the practice seems to have prevailed among the 
Greeks to a certain extent of inventing names of charac- 
ters, apparently historical, to symbolize the origin and the 
connection of certain notable races of men. Thus Ilellen 
in whose personality the most critical of ancients believed, 1 
is taken by almost all modern writers, even by Clinton, tor 
a mere name invented as a symbol of the common national- 
ity of the people whom he represented. But even with 
regard to national genealogies, we are in nowise entitled to 
assume that because they are peculiarly liable to forgery, 
therefore no national genealogy is in any case to be accepted 
to be true. Much less are we to make a general rule of 
evaporating all the most deeply-rooted local traditions of a 

1 Sec Thncyd., I. 3. 



HOMER. 193 

country into mere misty imaginations and unsubstantial 
symbols, and to assume that the " manufacture of fictitious 
personalities" (Grote), was the only or the main function 
of the popular intellect of any people, at any stage of their 
civilization. Man is a real creature, and he deals with 
realities; and of all realities, those which he is least dis- 
posed to lose hold of are the great men whose energy fathers 
any extraordinary product of the national life, and whose 
name marks any great national epoch. In conformity with 
this real tendency of human nature we find that in all popu- 
lar poetry the actions of famous men — the national heroes 
— form a much more prominent element than symbolized 
religious or physical philosophy ; 1 and the periods of intel- 
lectual and political advancement marked by such names as 
Homer and Theseus are precisely those in which a great 
reality would be more powerful to seize the minds of men 
than the most significant symbol. Extraordinary and even 
miraculous stories in the life of a historical personage ought 
not in the very least to shake our credit in his fundamental 
reality ; for it is precisely because his reality was so strik- 
ing and so overpowering that these miraculous stories were 
invented, and naturally found credit. The Israelites carried 
back the genealogy of their nation to the son of Isaac, from 
whom they sprung. Had the books of Moses, with all their 
circumstantial details and lifelike reality never been writ- 
ten, a German philologer might have said that Jacob was 
merely a symbol. In the same way, the Athenians ascribed 
certain great political changes in their country to the son of 
iEgeus, of whom various wonderful and superhuman stories 
are told ; but these stories no more justify us in throwing him 
into the limbo of symbols, than the ridiculous lies about Abra- 
ham and the other patriarchs, current in the Koran and other 
Eastern books, would entitle us to disallow the historical 



1 See some admirable remarks in Lauer, p. 131-174. 
17 



194 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

reality of the father of the faithful. In the same way — 
though there are some things of a plainly mythical nature 
in the traditional legends of Homer — to conclude from 
these that Homer himself is a myth, is to argue with the 
precipitation of a whim-intoxicated German, not with the 
deliberation of a sober-minded and judicious Englishman. 
Indeed, it is only doing the Germans justice to state that the 
" disallowance of the personality of Homer," to use Mr. 
Grote's phrase, is by no means so common among them now 
as in the first fever of intemperate Wolfian enthusiasm it 
might have been without offence. William Miiller, the 
most popular champion of Wolfian ideas, says distinctly in 
his Vorschule (p. 51) that " we are not called to question the 
personal existence of Homer ; " and Professor Welcker (to 
whose learned labors all students of Homer are so much 
indebted), Nitsch, C. 0. Miiller, Dr. Ihne (in Smith's Dic- 
tionary), Baiimlein, Lauer, and others who have written 
recently on the subject, show a moderation of temper, and a 
soundness of historical judgment, very far removed from 
what we are accustomed to designate as " German extrava- 
gance." It is becoming evident to a thoughtful observer 
that even among that most speculative, skeptical, and, intel- 
lectually speaking, most anarchical nation of Europe, the 
conflict of extreme views is beginning to produce its natural 
results in the recognition of the great human realities which 
lie at the bottom of the strong though unpurified historical 
convictions of the masses. 

So much for the Poet. The next question that presents 
itself in connection with the name of Homer, is that of the 
authenticity of the works which go under his name. What 
security have We that the poems we now read with such de- 
light and instruction are the identical works which Aristotle 
analyzed, which Plato denounced, which Thueydides and 
Strabo quoted as the best authority for some of the earliest 
and most important facts in Greek history and topography? 



HOMER. 195 

What guarantee further that the works which the great 
writers of the classic age of Greece, received as genuine 
works of the great Ionian bard, actually were so ; and how 
far they might not have been made subject to various inter- 
polations and mutilations in the three or four centuries that 
elapsed between the heroic age, when they were compared, 
and the historic age, when we find them made the subject 
of literary study and criticism ? The importance of these 
questions will appear the more strongly, when we bear in 
mind that the celebrity of Homer naturally led to the na- 
tional practice of stamping with his name many poetical 
works of a popular character, in which the stern tests 
applied by a severe criticism, refuse to find any marks of so 
illustrious a paternity. Prominent among these are the 
Homeric hymns, treated as authentic by Thucydides, and 
published as undoubted works of the great bard in the 
Editio Princeps, and other notable editions by modern 
scholars. Of the same kind are the Cypria already men- 
tioned, of the contents of which a short account is given by 
Proclus, the grammarian. To Homer also was very gen- 
erally attributed by the ancients the Colopherian poem 
called Margites ; and the Battle of the Frogs and Mice is 
an example of one of the many ndiyviu, or humorous popu- 
lar pieces, with the composition of which" the singer of the 
wrath of Achilles is supposed to have amused his mighty 
mind in his hours of relaxation. With regard to all these, 
it may be sufficient to state, that the ancients themselves 
were very far from exhibiting a serious agreement as to 
their authorship ; and their being attributed to Homer must 
be viewed as rather a floating popular belief, than a strong 
national conviction. Such being their character, it could 
not be expected that they should stand muster before the 
scrutinizing glance of modern criticism, and the skeptical 
analysis of the Germans. In talking of Homeric poems we 
must, therefore, remove these minor works altogether from 



196 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

our view ; but the fact of their having been for a long 
period so generally received as genuine works of the poet, 
leads us to treat with the greatest consideration the caution 
of those who demand the severest proof for the real author- 
ship of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Now, with regard to 
these two great works, there is, in the first place, not the 
slightest reason to doubt that we possess and use them, so 
far as the contents and the text are concerned, exactly as 
they were possessed and used by the Greeks of the classic 
ages ; and with regard to their authorship, the faith which 
we have that these identical works were the genuine works 
of the great Ionian epopoeist, was the general faith of the 
whole ancient world, both Greek and Roman; and in the 
case of the Iliad, at least, (for there were some difficulties 
started by a few curious inquirers with regard to the 
Odyssey,) a faith for centuries unshaken by a single breath 
of contradiction. That the Iliad, which we now read, is 
substantially the Iliad of Pindar and of Plato, can be 
proved to the satisfaction of any sane man, exactly in the 
same way that the Christian Scriptures, read now in the 
Christian churches, are proved to be substantially the same 
as those expounded by the earliest bishops, and sanctioned 
by the most authoritative councils of the church. To the 
Greeks, Homer was in fact a Bible, and guarded with all 
the care and all the piety that belongs to such a book ; a 
fact which at once explains the extravagant, and to our feel- 
ing, illiberal zeal with which Plato denounces it in his ideal 
polity, and at the same time puts into our hands a guarantee 
of the surest and most sacred kind for the general authen- 
ticity of the poems as we now read them. No person who 
is even superficially read in the Greek classics can tail to 
have observed how constantly all writers of note, from the 
severe and stern Aristotle, to the light and sportive Lucian, 

refer to Homer as to a writer of whom a universal knowl- 
edge might be presupposed in all their readers, and to 



HOMER. 197 

whom a universal respect was paid. The consequence of 
this frequent reference is, that there is no writer of an- 
tiquity of whom we are more sure that we possess his genu- 
ine words as current in the mouths of the ancients, than we 
are with regard to the author of the Iliad and Odyssey. 
But more than this. In the time of the Ptolomies, and 
when the productive power of Greek literature had begun 
to faint and die away, there was a special band of learned 
critics and commentators, who made it their business to col- 
late the various recensions of the Homeric epics, and to 
transmit their text to us with as much conscientious fidelity 
as was possible. Prominent among these were Aristarchus 
and Zenodotus, of whom the first has transmitted his name 
to modern times as a popular appellative for the literary 
man who exercises the higher sort of documental criticism 
as a vocation ; and not only do we know that such men ex- 
isted, and exercised their philologic care on the great 
national treasure of the Homeric text, but we have in the 
Venetian scholia, first published from the St. Mark's library 
by Villoison (1788), a series of notices of their method of 
critical procedure, and a list of their asterisks and obelisks, 
sufficient to dispel all doubt as to the unadulterated trans- 
mission of the Iliad and Odyssey, at least from the pe- 
riod when letters began to be a study and an occupation 
in Greece. But when did this period begin ? and what 
have we to say for the nature of the guarantees of authen- 
ticity, whatever they were, that existed before this period ? 
These are really serious questions, the answers to which 
have raised difficulties that have made wise men pause and 
foolish men stumble, not without observation. On all hands 
it is allowed that Pisistratus, the well-known Athenian 
tyrant (b. c. 560), was the first, so far at least as Athens is 
concerned, to collect together the various books or rhapso- 
dies of the Homeric epics, which were generally sung or 
recited separately, and to arrange and publish them — to 
17 * 



198 NEW glOGBAPHIES. 

use a modern phrase — in the form in which they now ex- 
ist. Pisistratus, therefore, or rather his literary coadjutors, 
among whom Onomacritus is prominently named, must be 
regarded as our first historical guarantee for the text of the 
Iliad and Odyssey as we now possess it ; but the details 
of his literary labors are unfortunately not in the least 
known to us ; so from this point backward we are left to 
conjecture, to historical probabilities and internal evidence, 
and to the hundred and one small skeptical doubts and 
skeptical solutions of those doubts, which will never cease 
to exercise the wits of those who are born to torment them- 
selves in this way. 

The question whether the Iliad as arranged by Pisistratus 
was, both in point of matter and arrangement, exactly the 
same as the Iliad, of which Homer was the reputed author, 
is a question that in the nature of the case admits of no per- 
fectly satisfactory answer. Absolutely the same of course 
in the nature of human things it cannot be ; for even the 
Christian Scriptures, guarded as they have been by the 
double sanction of individual and corporate authority, have 
not been transmitted through eighteen centuries of literary 
record without being made subject to several very notable 
interpolations ; nor can it even be said that any man at the 
present day can feel the same degree of certainty with re- 
gard to the text of Homer that he does witli regard to that 
of Milton, Tasso, Dante, or even Virgil. Why? Not only 
because of the greater lapse of time: for in a question of 
documentary criticism this is often a point of comparatively 
small moment ; but because of the different conditions under 

which these works were composed, and the different mediums 

through which, in their earliest stage, they were transmitted. 
We read of no l'isi<tratus that first collected th< 
tered hooks of the ,Eneid; the very MS. which Dante 
gloried in, or something as good, is no doubt lying in the 
Grand Duke's library in Florence at the present hour. In 



HOMER. 199 

the case of these poets people may be vexed with various 
readings and doubtful lines, — such questions as curious 
editors will raise even with regard to modern Scotts and 
Byrons ; but there is no talk about cutting out whole books, 
and the strange process with which learned Germans are so 
familiar, of restoring a great poem to its integrity by de- 
priving it of some of its most beautiful parts. Let us en- 
deavor, then, to fix a steady eye on the real state of the 
Homeric text at the time when it was collected by Pisis- 
tratus. What reason have we to suppose that it was then 
to any considerable extent interpolated, or changed in any 
way from its original condition as it came from the mouth 
of Homer? The answer to this question depends upon 
another. Who were the conservators of that trust, previous 
to the time of Pisistratus ; and what safeguards were they pro- 
vided with against those invasions of spurious matter to which 
all works of extensive circulation, and general popularity, 
are especially subject ? The conservators of the trust are, 
in the first place, the national doidol, minstrels or bards, who, 
like Homer himself, made a profession of singing songs and 
epic poems for the amusement of the people ; and when 
these had begun to wane, they were succeeded by the rhap- 
sodists or popular reciters, who performed the same func- 
tions, but with less original genius and less social dignity in 
an age when historians, and orators, and philosophers, and 
rhetoricians, had usurped many of the functions that had 
originally been exercised by the doidog. Now it is of im- 
mense importance in the criticism of Homer to ascertain 
clearly if possible what was the moral position of the origi- 
nal minstrel's profession with regard to the great poet ; for 
on this depends the likelihood of their either loosely inter- 
polating or conscientiously respecting the integrity of his 
works. That they cannot have felt the same religious sort 
of respect for him that arose in the Greeks of a later age, 
eeems pretty evident ; they were minstrels by trade as well 



200 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

as he, and could only look upon him in the exercise of their 
profession as primus inter pares. Nevertheless, they did 
respect him very much ; of which we have ample evidence 
in the existence of the famous guild or institution of poets 
of Chios, known by the name of the Homeridce, or sons of 
Homer, concerning whom we have the most distinct testi- 
mony in Harpocration. Whether any of the actual descend- 
ants of the poet formed the original nucleus of this fraternity 
we cannot tell ; but its existence under that designation is 
ample proof of the extraordinary respect in which Homer 
continued to be held in the parts of Asia nearest to his birth- 
place, and affords a sufficient practical guarantee that the 
professional minstrels who were incorporated under this 
name would not, from mere rash conceit, be inclined to tam- 
per with the real tradition of the Smyrnaean muse of which 
they were the select depositaries. On the other hand, it 
must not be forgotten that a poem like the Iliad, made not 
to be read as a continuous book, but to be sung in separate 
parts for the public amusement, was peculiarly liable to have 
such additions made to it or variations as the occasion might 
require. Of this our own ballads 1 supply every where 
abundant proof, the existing version of which is often pieced 
together from a variety of different texts, presenting all sorts 
of deficiencies and redundancies. That something of this 
kind should not have taken place with regard to the Ho- 
meric poems in general circulation through the scattered 
tribes of the Greeks, would have been positively miracu- 
lous; and we must suppose that the principal business of 
PisistratU8, in collecting these poems, was not. as some have 
Strangely BUpposed, to create an order which never rxi- 
hut to li x an order which was in danger of being lost. 

Whether in doing so be had the advantage of any complete 
correal ti\t derived from the Homeridae of Chios, with 

1 Sc<* Chambers' S p and Ballad* <■/' Scotland, p. inc. note. 



HOMER. 201 

which to compose and correct the scattered rhapsodies in 
popular currency, we cannot say ; but it is not at all un- 
likely ; — at any rate he would have little difficulty in re- 
storing the original arrangement of the books, partly because 
that order in the generality of cases shines out manifestly 
from the inherent character of the plot, and the progress of 
the story, partly because there could not fail to exist among 
the more literate and accomplished of the rhapsodists some 
one who could recite by memory not merely single books, 
but the whole concatenation of books, as the Homeridae of 
Chios had received them from their great father. Most 
assuredly, as has been insisted on both by Baiimlein and 
Grote, he never could have set himself seriously to make 
extensive modern interpolations in poems, the contents of 
which were well known over the whole of Greece, and had 
in Athens been made the subject of a special public regula- 
tion by their great lawgiver, Solon. 1 

In the view here given of the respective functions of the 
Homerida?, and of Pisistratus, in the transmission of the 
Homeric poems, we have said nothing about the famous 
question, whether the art of writing was known in Homer's 
time ? because a little reflection will show that this question 
has really very little bearing on the genuineness of the poems 
as we now possess them, and besides is a question that does 
not admit of a satisfactory answer. At the first blush, in- 
deed, when a modern who is the slave of pen and ink, hears 
it stated that in all likelihood the great bard of the Iliad 
could neither read nor write, he is apt to feel very much 
as if the whole foundation for his critical faith in the poet 
was removed from beneath his feet, and there was no 
longer any ground for him to stand on. How many an elo- 
quent modern speaker might be struck dumb if pen, ink, and 
paper were suddenly removed from the category of things 

1 See Diog. LaeH., in Solon, 9. 



202 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

that be ! But they managed these matters differently on 
Parnassus and Helicon in the days when Memory was the 
mother of the Muses, and the Muses could sing sweetly 
without help from a goose quill. We have the most distinct 
testimony of Julius Caesar (b. c. vi. 14), to the effect "that 
the pupils of the Druids learn by heart a great number of 
verses ; and some continue twenty years in a course of in- 
struction. Nor do they think it right to commit their doc- 
trines to writing, though in other matters they use the Greek 
alphabet. This they appear to do for two reasons ; first, that 
they may not make their religious mysteries too common and 
profane by general publication, and again, that they may not 
weaken the power of memory in their scholars by teaching 
them to trust to written notes ; for nothing is more common 
than that the abundance of literary helps teaches persons to 
remit their exertions in committing their knowledge to mem- 
ory." This remarkable passage reveals to us in the most 
striking manner the real secret of the transmission of the 
Homeric poems without the help of written manuscripts ; 
the memory of the minstrels was not more uncertain, but 
more true and trustworthy for this very reason, that they 
were not accustomed to depend for the faithful recollections 
of the poems which they recited, upon a leaf of papyrus or 
a library itself. In estimating the memorial powers of these 
men we must never forget not only that they exercised their 
art under intellectual conditions exactly the reverse of ti 
which now exist, but also that they had no other business or 
interests by which to distract their attention, and so could 
perform certain feats with ease, that bear the same relation 
to our common exercises of memory, that tumbling ami 
rope-dancing do to common walking. It is always in em- 
power, by exclusive and persevering exercise <>t' a favorite 
faculty in a favorite sphere, to perform apparent prodig 

We shall therefore readily disabuse ourselves of the Miper- 
ficial modern notion that written memoranda are n< 



HOMER. 203 

sary to the faithfulness of versified tradition ; the " wonder " 
as it has been called by Grote, of the " preservation " of 
such long poems from such early ages will become part of 
the common intellectual ctrill of an age eloquent without pa- 
per, and poetical without ink ; and the question will only 
remain, as a matter of legitimate curiosity with regard to the 
Iliad and Odyssey, whether their author was unacquainted 
with those useful arts of literary conservation, the knowl- 
edge of which is in our days justly accounted a necessary 
element in the lowest stages of popular education. Now 
with regard to the use of letters in Greece, the general voice 
of Hellenic antiquity pointed to Cadmus as having imported 
these cunning symbols from Phoenicia at a period far an- 
tecedent to the age of Homer, or even the supposed date 
of the Trojan War ; and this tradition is consistent not only 
with the philosophical analysis of their letters of the alpha- 
bet, but with the then general state of the civilization, and 
the admitted intercourse between Asia and the West, as 
having taken place in various forms at a very early period 
of the history of the world. There is every probability, 
therefore, in favor of the belief that letters, in some shape 
or other, were known in Greece, at whatever date, between 
the Trojan War and the year 850, which may be assumed 
as most convenient for the age of Homer. But from this 
probable belief with regard to the epoch of the knowledge 
of letters in Greece, the distance to a reasonable conviction, 
with regard to the practice of Homer himself in composing 
and preserving his poems, is very great, and not lightly to 
be overlooked. That letters, when first introduced, were 
used only in great public matters, and for inscriptions in' 
wood, stone, lead, and other heavy materials, not for writing 
a long concatenation of poetic rhapsodies, is conformable 
to the nature of the thing, and to every testimony on the 
subject. According to the usual slow progress of human 
affairs, three centuries at least may well have been required 



204 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

to transfer letters from the rare service of temple-porticos 
and monumental pillars, to the common use of literary con- 
servation ; so that, even assuming the use of letters for 
public purposes in the days of Homer, the probability may 
be considered very small that they were actually used by 
the poet or his immediate successors for any merely literary 
purpose. This probability becomes even less, when we 
consider that there is not a single allusion in the whole 
forty-eight books of the two poems to writing or books, as 
a part of the civilization which they describe ; * and though 
this in itself were no conclusive argument, as any poet who 
uses pen and ink is not even in these days obliged to make 
his heroes do so, yet taken in connection with the general 
character of the poems, and the circumstances of the time, 
as ascertained by historical analogy, it is in nowise to be 
looked on as an altogether indifferent circumstance. 

So far we have confined our remarks to the external aids 
and authorities, by means of which the poet and his works 
are in the first place commended to our attention. It now re- 
mains from this general basis of outward historical proba- 
bilities and presumptions, to direct our inquiry into the 
character and genius of the poems themselves, and from this 
investigation either to transmute our probabilities into cer- 
tainties, or throw them aside as unsupported, or contradicted 
by a higher, and the highest sort of evidence. For no 
mere array of authorities, however venerable, can in the 
long run support an incoherent tradition that carries its own 
contradiction in its face. This eternal superiority of imma- 
nent and inherent, to merely accredited evidence, has, since 
Bentlev's famous dissection of the epistles of Thalaris. ban- 
ished from the shelves of authentic classical tradition, many 
a hoary tome that had long held an honored place there, 

along witli the most venerated worthies o( the Greek and 



■e 



1 The nr/f/nra ?i<\pn in Iliad, vi. 168, i.- :unhipuou:>. 



HOMER. 205 

Roman pantheon. How stands the case with regard to the 
Iliad and Odyssey? Are these works what thej have for 
nearly three thousand years been reputed to be — the great 
poems of a great old Ionian poet — or do they bear the trick 
of forgery on their face, and show the patchwork of a bung- 
ling fabricator on the phylacteries of their outer garment ? 

The severe ordeal which the Homeric poems, in the way 
of internal analysis, have undergone, takes its rise in modern 
times from the publication of a famous edition by F. A. Wolf, 
a German professor of extraordinary talent, in the year 1795. 
This scholar, partly following the bent of his own genius, 
partly, no doubt, carried along by the general revolutionary 
tendencies of the age, did, in the Prolegomena prefixed to 
his edition, set forth an extremely skeptical doctrine with 
regard to Homer and his poetry, with such rare learning, 
vigor, and taste, that it was impossible for German minds to 
resist him ; and though the whole tendency and love of 
English scholarship runs in a directly contrary direction, 1 as 

1 It is remarkable that the germs of the Wolfian theory travelled 
from this country over to Germany; and Wolf, in his Prolegomena, 
honestly recognizes Wood and Bentley as valuable pioneers of the 
doctrine which he so eloquently enforces. Bentley's well-known 
utterance with regard to Homer is found in his Remarks on a late Dis- 
course on Free Thinking, by Phileleutherus Lipsiensis ( Works by Dyce, 
iii. 304). " To prove Homer's universal knowledge, our author says, 
'he designed his poem for eternity to please and instruct mankind;' but 
take my word for it, poor Homer, in those circumstances and early 
times, had never such aspiring thoughts. He wrote a sequel of songs 
and rhapsodies to be sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer, at 
festivals and other days of merriment ; the Iliad he made for the men, 
and the Odyssey for the other sex ; " from which passage thrown out 
incidentally, however, be it remembered, and not deliberately meas- 
ured in every word, one thing seems plain, that by using the word 
" Sequel," the great critic gives us plainly to understand that he held 
there was an essential unity of plan going through both works, which 
puts him plainly out of the roll of thorough-going Wolfians, and 
advocates of what Nitech calls the Klein-lieder-theorie. Among other 
18 



206 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

the great work of Clinton sufficiently testifies, it cannot be 
denied that beyond the pale of mere Oxonians the Wolfian 
views have exercised no small influence in forming the criti- 
cal opinions of some of the best educated minds in England. 
The critical spirit of the age, the skeptical researches of 
Niebuhr with regard to Roman history, and the increasing 
action of German scholarship on the learning of this coun- 
try, have all tended to produce this result. The theory of 
Wolf, founded not merely on a minute critical analysis of 
the poems, but, as he imagined also, on satisfactory external 
evidence, was to the effect, that whether a great poet called 
Homer ever existed or not, the two great poems generally 
attributed to him are no homogeneous works created by the 
plastic power of a presiding genius, but mere aggregates of 
various origin, gathered together from the great floating ele- 
ment of popular poetry in Greece, and cunningly licked 
into shape by certain expert literary artizans in the days of 
Pisistratus. Now, with regard to the external evidence on 
which this paradox is founded, it seems at this hour gener- 
ally agreed, even among the Germans, that the authorities 
relied on by Wolf do in nowise support his extreme con- 
clusion, do not in fact go beyond the historical statement of 
the matter which we have just made, — a statement per- 
fectly consistent both with the personal existence of one 
great poet, and the organizing action of his presiding spirit 
on the two great poems that go by his name. The advo- 
cates of the Wolfian theory, therefore, are now driven to 
confine themselves to a series of arguments drawn from the 
minute critical examination of the text of the poems, hy 
means of which they think they have evolved such an 
imposing array of inconsistencies, as is utterly incompatible 

notable anticipators of Wolfs theory, the case o( the Neapolitan phi- 
losopher Vico, has often been mentioned. See Sciavsa nuova Ubro 
term; deBa discovtrta dd vav Omero, first published in the year I 

and repeatedly reprinted. 



HOMER. 207 

with the belief in the presiding control of one great mind. 
Among those who have distinguished themselves in this 
field of what we may call Homeric histology, is Carl Lach- 
mann, lately deceased, a Berlin professor of great erudition 
and subtlety, as attested by well-known works in various 
departments of philological investigation. It behooves us, 
therefore, to inquire, on what presumptions and on what 
principles the analytical criticism of this school is founded ; 
and when we have shown that these presumptions require 
to be inverted, and that these principles are altogether false 
or altogether misapplied, we may spare our readers the 
trouble of a minute and curious refutation of the individual 
objections. Those who wish to pursue the question into its 
details, may consult the little tract of Lachmann, 1 or the 
English work of Colonel Mure, 2 a book replete with the 
best German learning, and, what is of greater consequence, 
animated throughout with a spirit of good-sense, and a fine 
poetical appreciation, which very few Germans can boast of. 
In an investigation of this kind the presumptions with 
which a man starts, though not always distinctly set forth, 
are of the utmost consequence in determining his procedure. 
The false historical presumptions from which Wolf pro- 
ceeded, naturally led him to seek for flaws in the texture of 
the Homeric poems ; and it is manifest that even Mr. Grote, 
who justly considers the extreme Wolfian theory as quite 
untenable, in propounding his wild scheme of resolving the 
Iliad into two distinct parts, has been influenced, partly by 
his desire to mitigate what he calls " the wonder " of the 
creation, and the preservation of two such long continuous 
poems, bearing the stamp of one mind, in an age when writ- 
ing was altogether unknown. That there are no external 

1 Betrachtungen uber Homer's Was, Berlin, 1847. 

2 A Critical History of the Language and Literature of Ancient Greece, 
second edition, London, 1854, vols. i. and ii. 



208 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

historical presumptions of this kind we have already at- 
tempted to show ; a presumption of a different kind we shall 
now state. It is not to be presumed that Homer would be 
anxiously accurate about the mere articulation or joint-work 
of his epic poems, for several reasons. First, because he 
was a poet, and aimed, as all true poets do, mainly at pro- 
ducing an effect on the feelings and imaginations of his 
hearers, not on their mere cognitive capacity. Small mis- 
takes in incidental matters taken cognizance of by the curi- 
ous understanding only, might, without offence, be committed 
by a great singer of poetry, as they would certainly not be 
observed by a healthy-minded hearer ; and that mistakes of 
this kind actually have been made, and are even now daily 
made by poets and novelists of the highest order, has been 
shown by Colonel Mure in the most effective manner. 
Second, because he was a popular poet, a wandering minstrel 
with a lyre in his hand, as he is truly represented in all the 
old biographies, and not a learned Southey sitting in a li- 
brary, with books, and desk, and pen, and ink, printers' proof 
sheets, publishers' quarterly reviews, and every sort of liter- 
ary apparatus of the newest and most approved description. 
In judging of the Iliad as a whole, we must never forget, 
though it seems to be very generally forgotten, thai it was 
not, could not be, Homer's immediate object to compose a 
great whole, for the plain and simple reason that lie had 
comparatively few opportunities of using such a whole. His 
art, therefore, was to concatenate a series of parts, which. 
While they might be used with effect on a tew great festive 
occasions as a whole, were meant to produce their general 

ami modi appreciable effect, in the Bhape of parts either 
absolutely complete in themselves, or admitting of being 
easily supplemented by the indwelling traditional hue, 
which the poet could legitimately presuppose in the minds of 
his hearers. Something analogous to this we have in the 
great historical plays of Shakspeare, consisting of seven! 



HOMER. 209 

parts, in any of which if there happened to be some small 
inconsistencies with the other parts, none but a curious per- 
son making a business of criticism would ever notice it, as 
the parts, though connected in conception, are so constructed 
as to give the impression of completeness, where they are 
represented as separate wholes. If this point be duly con- 
sidered, and there is nothing more certain or more duly 
attested in the history of these poems, the weakness of a 
great number of the objections made by Lachmann and 
Grote to the concatenation of the Iliad will instantly appear. 
The tenth book for instance — that in which the midnight 
expedition of Diomedes and Ulysses is described — has, it- 
is said, no necessary connection with the parts of the poem 
that precede or follow, and might be cut out without injury. 
Of course ; because it was the object of the poet to string 
together a number of little wholes, originally independent, 
that they might still remain little wholes, and yet become 
parts of a great whole — an exquisite trick of art plainly, 
and which, as the whole history of popular poetry teaches, 
it required precisely a mighty genius like Homer to perform. 
And this brings us to the third presumption, with which we 
must start in judging of the alleged inconsistencies of the 
Iliad, We must bear in mind that Homer did not make 
his materials, but received them ; the little wholes which he 
had to recast and organize into a great whole, already 
existed in the minds and in the mouths of the people whom 
he addressed, just as the Romaic ballads that arose out of 
the war of 'independence in 1821-7 exist in the minds and 
mouths of the Hellenes of the present day, waiting for some 
second Homer, it may be, to fuse them with a great epos 
of Missolonghi, when the day may at length have come 
for that reconstruction of that Byzantine empire which the 
late Czar of Russia said he would on no account tolerate. 
In the same way an epic poem of Caledonian loyalty, 
were the times favorable, might be made out of the materials 

18* -' 



210 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

contained in the Scottish Jacobite songs ; and a grander 
epos still called " The Fall of Napoleon," might be con- 
structed containing many finely dramatic materials from the 
war songs composed by Korner and others in the great Ger- 
man rising of 1813. Now, if the rich materials of popular 
traditionary song, out of which Homer constructed the Iliad 
(and no person who knows any thing about such matters will 
think it more probable that he made it out of nothing) con- 
tained, as they could not but contain, certain elements that 
would be incongruous, when the different parts were worked 
up into a new whole ; and if Homer did not care — as the 
practice of his art did not require him to be particularly 
curious — whether every line or phrase that marked the 
original independence of these parts, was nicely obliterated, 
it is manifest that the small flaws in the concatenation which 
may here and there be visible to the curious eye, prove, not 
as Lachmann imagines, that one poet did not organize tin- 
whole, but that Homer gave himself no concern to disgui.-e 
the fact, that the several parts of his poem, both in the pop- 
ular tradition and in the actual practice of his art, bad a 
complete and independent existence apart from the magni- 
ficent whole into which his genius had organized them. 

These considerations will enable the student of Homer to 
make short work, not only with the hypercritical eaptiousnos 
and the peeping anatomy of Lachmann's BrtrachtHiigen, but 
also with the more large and philosophical analysis of .Mr. 
CJrote. We must not start in our inquiry into the unity 
of the Jliad, with the strong inclination to magnify the im- 
portance of small inconsistencies, but with the most charita- 
ble desire possible to overlook them. This poet, as com- 
pared with Virgil, Dante or Milton, demands the special 

indulgence Of the Critic ; and yet it does rather seem that 
from Wolf down to Grote, the whole army of objectoM 
keenly set upon being particularly severe, in many* 
itivelv ill-natured, and, from a poetic point of view, a- 



HOMER. 211 

Colonel Mure has triumphantly shown, positively unjust. 
For not only do they pay no regard to those kindly consider- 
ations which we have stated, arising out of the peculiar 
position of the poet, and the nature of his materials, but 
with a perverse ingenuity pardonable scarcely in Germans, 
they insist on judging poetry by rules applicable only to 
works composed with a strictly practical, or a purely scien- 
tific view. If an experienced soldier like Napoleon could 
criticize with such a cutting eloquence the description of the 
taking of Troy by the polished and learned Virgil which yet 
speaks admirably to the imagination, 1 how strange and how 
unreasonable that a gentleman of Mr. Grote's discernment 
should urge as a strong proof against the authenticity of the 
seventh book of the Iliad, the circumstance that it repre- 
sents a ditch or dyke, as having been made in the ninth year 
of the war, w T hich, according to all principles of military 
tactics, .should have been made, as Thucydides 2 seems to 
have taken the liberty of supposing it was made, in the first 
year ! The answer to all such very scientific cavils is this, 
that Homer was neither a soldier nor a critic, but a poet ; 
and that when composing the seventh book of the Jliad, he 
had before his mind's eye not a future Vegetius or a Grote, 
but only the wrath of Achilles, and the place which that oc- 
cupied in the popular traditions of -ZEolia. If critical spec- 
tacles were not used when popular poems were composed, 
their correct appreciation can allow no place to scientific 
microscopes. Many things may be discovered by scientific 
eyes, — wonders in the white rock, wonders in the blue 
cheese, — but the character and effect of popular poetry 
does not come within the laws of that particular kind of 
vision. Even Mr. Grote, who has so ably exposed the 
absurdity of the Wolfian " small song theory " (Klein-lie- 
der-theorie), which resolves the Iliad into an aggregate of 

1 See Classical Museum, Vol. I. p. 205. " History, I. 11. 



212 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

separate ballads, implying no common authorship on the 
ground of alleged inconsistencies, has, in attempting to 
resolve the same great work into two separate works, the 
AcJdlleid and the Iliad, adopted a principle of criticism, 
which every man who has any practical knowledge of poets 
and poetry, must feel to be quite out of place. " The last 
two books of the poem," he says, " were probably additions 
to the original AcJdlleid ; for the death of Hector satisfies the 
exigencies of a coherent scheme, and we are not entitled to 
extend the oldest poem beyond the limits which such neces- 
sity prescribes. And in the spirit of this criticism, he cuts 
out the whole books, from the second to the seventh inclu- 
sive, because the coherent scheme of an Achilleid is suffi- 
ciently satisfied without them, and there is no necessity for 
extending the oldest poem beyond the limits which such 
exigency requires. But a great poet is not influenced in the 
selection or the arrangement of his material by any exi- 
gency of this kind; that nude coherency of scheme which 
satisfies a mere logical mind, may omit precisely those ele- 
ments which work most powerfully on his own mind and 
that of his hearers ; not imaginative meagreness and par- 
simony, but luxuriance and exuberance is his law. On the 
whole, the candid student of Lachmann and Grote, if he be a 
person of native poetical appreciation, will have no difficulty 
in coining to the conclusion, that the great-mads of the 
recent skeptical objections against the organic unity of the 
Iliad, proceed on essentially perverse and oblique principles, 
and that the brave old minstrel has assuredly fallen on evil 
days, when men are eager to judge him for whose judgment 
lie never wrote, and by canons which he never acknowl- 
edged. 

The current of these remarks by no means implies that 
there are no interpolations in the received text of Homer. 
They are merely to the effect, thai the sharpest scrutiny ot' 
modern criticism and hypercriticism lias failed to point out 



HOMER. 213 

any such gross incongruities in the component parts of the 
poem, as would distinctly indicate the separate authorship 
of those parts. In other words, the positive impression of 
an organic unity which the unlearned reader receives from 
the perusal of these poems, can in nowise be considered to 
have been nullified by the multiform endeavors of learned 
men to prove, that these famous poems are, to any consider- 
able extent, an aggregation of independent and unharmo- 
nized integers. That those integers once existed in that 
crude state, may be assumed as most certainly true ; but the 
poems, as we now have them, prove, in the face of the most 
cruel analysis, that these crude elements did, in the earliest 
ages of Greek culture, come under the fusing and formative 
influence of a great poet-mind so completely, that any at- 
tempt to resolve them into their primitive elements by the 
method of mere analysis must prove a failure. With this 
understanding, every reasonable man must be willing to 
admit that there are, and must in the nature of the case be, 
not a few extraneous additions to a work, which was a sort 
of public property in everybody's hands for several hundred 
years before it was finally fixed down to the literary form in 
which we now have it. Some of the interpolations, of 
course, may be pointed out, with more or less success, ac- 
cording to the general laws by which incongruities in liter- 
ary documents are exposed ; but in addition to the pre- 
sumptions for leniency of treatment already stated, the 
critical reviser of the Homeric text must bear in mind, that 
there prevails in the popular poetry of all countries a cer- 
tain current tone, and common property in thought and 
in expression, which makes it extremely difficult, from mere 
internal evidence, to distinguish the original work of the 
great master-mind from the additions made by a skilful 
interpolator. Under these extremely delicate and dubious 
conditions, it does appear extremely strange, that Lachmann 
and so many other learned Germans, should talk with as 



214 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

much dogmatic decision -about the original constituent ele- 
ments of the Iliad, as if they had been present at their 
creation, and personally superintended their manufacture; 
and a plain man can only conclude with regard to the whole 
matter, that in philology, as in metaphysics, these" minute 
investigators have, by an intense special devotion, worked 
themselves into a sort of chronic insanity, from which only 
time and the gradual operation of certain potent political 
and social causes may ultimately achieve their redemption. 

Before w r e leave this part of the subject a few words may 
be allowed to the famous question, Whether, assuming Ho- 
mer's authorship of the Iliad, there be not reasonable 
grounds for assigning the Odyssey to the plastic powers of 
a different and less mighty minstrel ? Now, if this were 
altogether an open question, and there were no distinct and 
intelligible Hellenic traditions as to the common authorship 
of these two wonderful poems, not a few things might be 
urged in favor of a separate authorship which might have 
weight with a reasonable critic. There is a certain more 
mild and subdued tone in the Odyssey, which, along with 
certain points of difference in incidental matters, might be 
sufficient, were there no contrary evidence- to authorize the 
supposition of a different intellectual origin. But the great 
error of those who, in modern times, take upon themselves 
to assert the separate authorship of these works, is the 
groundless assumption that the general voice and tradition 
of Hellenic antiquity is to be taken as an element of no 
weight soever, in the critical estimate o\ % such a matter. 
On this point we differ iofo cifIo from the Germans, and are 
nothing ashamed to believe, with our learned countryman, 
Colonel Mure, thai Aristotle, Plato, and the overwhelming 
majority of the highest intellects in Greece, had very suf- 
ficient reasons for placing a wide gulf between the two 

epic poems which they agreed to stain}) with the name of 
Homer, and the very interior works of a cognate character, 



HOMER. 215 

known afterwards under the name of the Epic Cycle. Na- 
ture did not produce twin Homers in those old Greek days, 
we may depend upon it, any more than she has produced in 
these days twin Dantes or twin Shakespeares. 1 If there 
had been a second Homer of genius large enough to pro- 
duce a counterpoise to such a work as the Iliad, no doubt 
the Homeridae of some second Chios would have been 
equally eager to stereotype his memory in their compo- 
sition, and to immortalize themselves with his name. But 
precisely, we imagine, because there was only one Homer, 
was there only one guild of gentile Homeridae, and one 
uniform undisputed authorship of the Iliad and the Odys- 
sey among the Greeks till some pragmatical grammarians in 
meagre Alexandria (among whom a certain Xenon and 
Hellanicus are specialized), the prototypes of our modern 
TVolfians, began to nibble at imagined incongruities, and to 
moot the question of separate authorship. Such being the 
historical conditions under which the question is raised, it is 
manifest that the presumptions, as in the question about the 
unity of the Iliad, are all against the disintegrators ; and a 
detailed examination of their array of minute and micro- 
scopic objections to the common authorship will, in all likeli- 
hood, bring the intelligent student, a's it has brought Colonel 
Mure, to a distinct verdict of not -proven. One may, indeed, 
urge the same objection against all the objections of the 
Separatists — XcoQi^ovreg as they were called — that Mr. 
Grote has urged against Lachmann and the minute dissec- 
tors of the Iliad. " The Wolfian theory," says that emi- 
nent scholar, " explains the gaps and contradictions through- 
out the narrative, but it explains nothing else. In like 
manner, we may say the theory of the Separatists explains 
the small incongruities between the Iliad and the Odyssey, 

1 " Some people believe in twenty Homers ; we in one. Nature is 
not so prodigal of her poets." (John Wilson, in Blackwood's Maga- 
zine, April, 1831.) 



216 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

but it leaves out of account altogether a more difficult matter 
to explain — the very remarkable congruity that exists be- 
tween the whole style, tone, color, and materials of these 
poems. This congruity has been pointed out with great 
skill and effect by Colonel Mure, also by a recent French 
writer, Alexis Pierron, 1 whose words, after so much heavy 
discussion with the Germans, the English reader will doubt- 
less accept as a welcome relief : — 

" Mais le style, les tours de phrase, l'ordre et le mouve- 
ment des pensees ! mais le versification ! mais les formules 
consacrees ! mais les epithetes traditionelles ! c'est la ce que 
les chorizontes negligent de comparer dans le dieux poems. 
Je n'hesite pas a dire, que cent vers pris au hazard dans Tun 
ne ressemblent pas moins a cent vers pris dans l'autre, et pour 
la facture, et pour la tournure, et pour le mouvement general, 
que ceux-ci ne ressemblent a tous les vers qui les precedent 
et les suivent. Si le style est l'homme raeme, comme dit 
Buffon, le meme style c'est le raeme homme. If n'y a qu'un 
Homere. Le style ne s'en leve pas : et, malgre tous les 
efforts, on ne prend pas le tour d'esprit d'un autre : on 
n'ecrit qu'avec soi meme, mieux qu'autrui ou plus mal, aussi 
bien peut-etre, mais toujours autrement. Sans doute c'est 
une grande merveille, cfue le meme homme qui a compose 
l'lliade soit aussi 1'auteur de l'Odyssee. Mais le phenomene 
de ressemblance admis pas le chorizontes est bien plus inoui 
encore. Le vieux Pythagoricien, Ennius, disoit que lame 
d'Homere avoit passe dans hi sienne ; et Ton sait quel Ho- 
mere e'etoit qu' Ennius. C'est bien une autre metenip-y- 
cose qu'il nous faudrait admettre, pour donner raisoo a 
Pythagoriciens nouveaux. II y a une chose cenl fois plus 
extraordinaire que l'existence d'un Homere unique, e'esl 
l'existenee de deux Ilomeres." 

After having cleared our way through this dreary aeeu- 

1 Litte'rrAurc Grccqur, Paris, IS50. 



HOMER. 217 

mulation of critical briers and brambles, it only remains 
that we state shortly what is the real character and worth of 
the Homeric poems, as we have them, and what is their 
proper and enduring place in the poetical literature of the 
world. And here we must start with a grateful recognition 
of the point of view on which our judgment of the Homeric 
poems has been placed by the labors of Wolf and his fol- 
lowers. Their error did not lie in their blindness to the true 
character of these productions, but in their attributing to a 
dozen or a score of Homers a phenomenon which finds a 
more obvious and satisfactory explanation in the time-hon- 
ored recognition of one. But the genuine character of the 
Iliad and the Odyssey as the poetry of the people composed 
to be sung, not the poetry of the individual written to be 
read, though previously discovered by Bentley, Vico, and 
Wood, 1 was never generally acknowledged and felt till it 
was brought forward by Wolf, and scattered over Europe 
by the host of enthusiastic disciples whom his genius roused 
into a new and vivid consciousness of a great truth. All 
the errors of that school, in fact, which we have been obliged 
to criticize in severe language, were but exaggerations and 
caricatures of the great truth which Wolf propounded in 
his Prolegomena of the essential generic difference between 
Paradise Lost, the epos of the scholarly man Milton, and 
Homer's Iliad, the epos of the rude Greek people. Homer 
lived in an age when the individual poet had not commenced 
to separate himself from the general culture of his people, 
after such a strange fashion as we see in the Shelleys, the 
Byrons, the Wordsworths, and the Tennysons of modern 
times. The poetry of Homer, therefore, represents the age 
of Homer more completely than the most popular of our 
highly cultivated modern poetry represents the age to which 
the poet belongs. The reason of this plainly is, that in the 

1 An Essay On the Original Genius and Writings of Homer, by R. 
Wood, Esq., London, 1770. 

19 



218 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

earliest ages of society, the minstrel was the only and the 
universal exponent of the highest moral and intellectual life 
of his age, and had an existence only as expressing this 
culture in a popular and effective way. Whereas, in later 
times, the man of genius rose into an independent existence, 
and often expressed merely his own cultures and that of a 
select body — more or less numerous — of literary sympa- 
thizers and admirers whom he might have the power to 
attach. The intimate relation that existed between the 
heroic doidog and his hearers may perhaps be best under- 
stood by comparing that sort of action and reaction which 
exists between the writers of leading articles in a newspa- 
per like the Times, and the public to whom their daily ap- 
peals are addressed. A similar case occurs in the weekly 
addresses of a popular preacher to a religious people like the 
Scotch, whose faith has not degenerated into decent formal- 
ism or unmeaning ceremonial. Herein, therefore, lies the 
invaluable excellence of the Homeric poems, which "Wolf 
profoundly felt, and which made him careless about the mere 
personality of their reputed author, — in the fact that, 
whether these poems be the composition of one, or a half a 
hundred minstrels, they are equally inspired by the breath 
of a great poetic soul, and that soul the highest life of the 
Greek people, at one of the most poetic periods of its exist- 
ence. Recognizing this fundamental truth, the great Ger- 
man critic could readily let loose from his grasp a great 
many much-bespoken excellencies of the mere man Homer, 
apart from the Greek people, which were either quite imag- 
inary, or not at all necessary to the main fact of the essen- 
tially popular and national character of the poems. In 
room of a great mass of foolish indiscriminate eulogy heaped 
up by various famous critics both ancient and modern. Wolf 
enunciated the peculiar excellence of the great king of Hel- 
lenic ballad-singers in the following simple and significant 
words: u Ilaec carmina paullo diligentius cognita admiran- 



HOMER. 219 

dam ostendant vim nature atque ingenii minorem artis, nul- 
lam reconditae doctrinse et exquisitae." 1 The first great excel- 
lence of Homer's poetry, as here expressed, undoubtedly lies 
in its complete naturalness, simplicity, and healthiness, with 
an entire absence of all those faults which are the natural 
product of over-stimulated art in a high state of intellectual 
culture. In thought, Homer exhibits nothing strained, far- 
fetched, or affected ; in sentiment, no morbid groping, no cu- 
rious over-nice sensibility in particular favorite directions ; 
in moral tone, neither prudery nor wantonness ; no uncom- 
fortable strife between the real and ideal, between poetry 
and life, between rhyme and reason. With the bard of the 
Iliad, as indeed to a great extent with all the Greek poets 
in the best ages, the ideal is only the highest step in the lad- 
der of the real. In style again, we find in Homer, as in the 
Old Testament, nothing that smacks of the artist ; there is no 
forced and studied concentration as in Thucydides and 
Tacitus ; no stringing together of brilliant antitheses as in 
Velleius Paterculus ; much less any theatrical turgidity and 
proposed pomp of words as in Lucan, and not a few of the 
later classics, both Greek and Roman, who flourished at a 
period when language had lost its native modesty and be- 
come vitiated, as a conceited beauty does by an assiduous 
contemplation of her own perfections. Closely connected 
with this complete naturalness of Homer, is his remarkable 
objectiveness, as the German critics call it, — that is to say, 
the extraordinary clearness, breadth, accuracy, and vigor of 
his impressions of the external world : or as an artist would 
say, his fine eye both for minute delicacy of detail and gran- 
deur of general effect in his pictures. The reason of this 
lies in the fact that Homer lived in a perfectly natural state 
of society, when all men, and especially poets, were con- 
stantly called upon to use their eyes, not upon gray parch- 

1 Prolegom., 12. 



220 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

ment and spotted paper, but upon the fresh and ever-chang- 
ing variety of those soul-seizing pictures which nature and 
life are continually pouring in upon those whose eyes are 
quick and open to her fulness. In Homer there is found 
not the least trace of the anxiously subtle thought, the loose- 
floating sentiment, the cloudy imaginations, the dim specula- 
tions, the gray intangible abstractions that never fail to char- 
acterize the poetry of a later age, when the particular men- 
tal character of the poet assumes an undue prominence, and 
the writer wastes himself in a painful struggle to find ade- 
quate expressions for certain infinite longings and indefinite 
desires that have no counterpart in the external world, or in 
the bosom of any healthy-minded reader. Not a less re- 
markable consequence of the nice harmony between Homel- 
and his audience was the honest faith and unaffected re- 
ligiousness that breathes through every page of his two great 
works. Poets, indeed, are naturally a religious race, and. 
except under peculiar, harsh influences, readily harmonize 
with the theological belief of the country to whose human 
aspirations it is their high mission to give utterance. But in 
ages of high intellectual culture, when the individual often 
runs aside into strange tracks of private speculation, the lead- 
ing minds of the day, including poets, often find themselves 
forced into a state of strange and uncomfortable protest 
against the religious convictions of the masses whom they 
are destined to lead; and in this way strange phenomena 
become visible in the literary heaven, — as in the ease of 
Euripides, Lucretius, Luean, Lueian, Goethe, B) TOO, Burns, 
Shelley, and many more. With difficulties o\' this kind, 
which always interfere to a great extent with a poet's popu- 
lar influence, Homer had nothing to do. The theology of 
his day was no doubt full of puerilities, and not free from 

contradictions ; but philosophy yet unborn had not brought 
these puerilities and inconsistencies into a distinctly felt 

collision with the higher sentiments of a healthy piety in the 



HOMER. 221 

mind of the great minstrel. Homer's piety is accordingly 
thoroughly serious, but withal playfully cheerful. Calvin- 
istic readers might think him jesting sometimes ; and grave 
German critics have been offended at the tone of the love 
affair of Ares and Aphrodite in Odyssey viii., which they 
confidently pronounce an interpolation ; x but they are mis- 
taken, — Lucian did not live till one thousand years after- 
wards and he wrote many clever comic sketches indeed, but 
not an Mad. The epic poet, or great popular minstrel of a 
heroic age, is always a believer. 2 

The extraordinary excellence of the Iliad and Odyssey as 
pattern specimens of the popular epos, may be most readily 
discerned by comparing them with the Niebelungen-lay 
of the Germans, a poem composed in a similar stage of 
society, and so much under the same circumstances that 
Lachmann actually set himself to analyze it after the Wolfian 
fashion, and resolve it into what he considered its constituent 
"small songs." In this Teutonic epos the unprejudiced 
reader will, along with many quiet beauties, discover an 
utter want of that equestrian vigor, manfulness, and fire, 
which never remit in the sinewy and bracing course of the 
Mad. Homer sometimes seems to take his subject easily, — ■ 
either sleeps himself, no doubt, or some interpolated Homerid 
is sleeping in his chair, — but he is never flat, never thin, 
never weak. Of the Niebelungen-lay, on the other hand, 
we may say that breadth, dilution, and weakness are the char- 
acteristics ; it is a German Mad, and a very German Mad 

1 On this point, and on the subject of Homeric interpolation gener- 
ally, see some admirable remarks in a paper by W. Watkins Lloyd. 
Classical Museum, Vol. vi., p. 387. 

2 On the interesting subject of the Theology of Homer, see Nagels- 
bach's Homerische Theologie, Niirnberg, 1840; and Classical Museum, 
Vol. vii., p. 414. The work of Granville Penn, — " An Examination 
of the Primary Argument of the Iliad, London, 1821," — contains some 
ideas on this subject that must be regarded as high-flown and hyper- 
bolical, and remote from the simple truth. 

19* 



222 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

indeed, as Coleridge said of the Messiah of Klopstock — an 
Iliad composed by an old German in his easy chair, envelop- 
ing his ungirt muse in a loose-floating atmosphere of tobacco- 
smoke ; — Homer in his slippers. But besides vigor, the 
Greek asserts his proud preeminence over the German by 
the healthy hilarity, and the rich sunny luxuriance of his 
fine Ionic temperament. One feels that these poems were 
written in a clime where, next to Olympian Jove, the shin- 
ing Apollo was the great object of local worship. His 
variety and many-sidedness have been equally praised ; for, 
though it is certainly true that there is, for our modern 
tastes, a very considerable superfluity of mere fighting in the 
Iliad, we must bear in mind that Homer wrote in an age 
when the soldier was the only hero, and for a people to 
whom the recital of the military exploits of their ancestors 
was as full of moral significance, as the trials of the Apostle 
Paul are to a modern Christian. Not less admirable, finally, 
than his vigor, his sunniness, and his luxuriant variety, are 
the sobriety, sense, and moderation — the truly Greek owyoo- 
6vvj] — that everywhere regulate, and keep within chaste lim- 
its, the billowy enthusiasm of the old minstrel. Occasionally, 
perhaps, when a patriotic feeling interferes, there may be 
discerned a little ludicrous exaggeration — as, for example, 
in the manner in which Hector is made to comport himself 
before the might of Achilles, in the twenty-second book ; 
but, generally speaking, the poet's thorough naturalness and 
truth, keep him by a safe instinct within the nicest limits of 
good taste. In the Niebelungen-lay, on the other hand, as 
in Klopstock's Messiah, there is a plentiful exhibition, in the 
author's way, of the most appalling exaggeration. The Ca- 
tastrophe of the Odyssey^ do doubt is sufficiently bloody; but 
this is the divine retributive vengeance of a goddess for a 

long series of otl'ences of a very gross and wanton descrip- 
tion ; and, besides, it may well be called sober and moderate 
when contrasted with that gigantic Cyclopean architecture 



HOMER. 223 

of terrors cemented with streaming blood, and wrapt in 
flames of portentous conflagration, which forms such a 
grim catastrophe to the grim epos of Niebelungen. 

The works of Homer have been translated into all the 
notable languages of the West ; seldom, however, or never, 
it is to be feared, with the pervading perception of his true 
character as a great popular minstrel, the general under- 
standing of which great truth, as we have stated, dates in 
Europe only from the publication of Wolf's Prolegomena 
about sixty years ago. The best Italian translations are by 
Cesarroti and Monti; French, by Dacier, de Eochefort, 
Bitaube and Dugas-Montbel ; German, by Stolberg and 
Voss ; English, by Chapman, Hobbes, Pope, Cowper, 
Sotheby, and Newman. 

For other details with regard to Homeric literature, 
which forms a library in itself, the student, besides Colonel 
Mure's great work, may consult Bernhardy's Griechische 
Literatur, Halle, 1845 ; Lauer's Homerische Poesie, Berlin, 
1851, and Dr. Ihne's article in Smith's Dictionary. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH 



Oliver Goldsmith was one of the most pleasing Eng- 
lish writers of the eighteenth century. He was of a Protes- 
tant and Saxon family which had long been settled in Ire- 
land, and which had, like most other Protestant and Saxon 
families, been, in troubled times, harassed and put in fear by 
the native population. His father, Charles Goldsmith, 
studied in the reign of Queen Anne at the diocesan school 
of Elphin, became attached to the daughter of the school- 
master, married her, took orders, and settled at a place 
called Pallas, in the county of Longford. There he with 
difficulty supported his wife and chijdren on what he could 
earn, partly as a curate and partly as a farmer. 

At Pallas, Oliver Goldsmith was born in November, 
1728. That spot was then, for all practical purposes, almost 
as remote from the busy and splendid capital in which his 
later years were passed, as any clearing in Upper I anada 
or any sheep-walk in Australasia now is. Even at this day, 
those enthusiasts who venture to make a pilgrimage to the 
birthplace of the poet, are forced to perform the latter part 
of their journey on foot. The hamlet lies far from any 
high road, on a dreary plain which, in wet weather, is often 
a lake. The lanes would break any jaunting ear to pit. 
and there are nils and Bloughfl through which the most 
Strongly built wheels cannot be dragged. 
(824) 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 225 

While Oliver was still a child, his father was presented 
to a living worth about 200/. a year in the county of West- 
meath. The family accordingly quitted their cottage in the 
wilderness for a spacious house on a frequented road, near 
the village of Lissoy. Here the boy was taught his letters 
by a maid-servant, and was sent in his seventh year to a 
village school kept by an old quarter-master on half pay, 
who professed to teach nothing but reading, writing, and 
arithmetic, but who had an inexhaustible fund of stories 
about ghosts, banshees, and fairies, about the great Rap- 
paree chiefs, Baldearg O'Donnell and galloping Hogan, and 
about the exploits of Peterborough and Stanhope, the sur- 
prise of Monjuich, and the glorious disaster of Brihuega. 
This man must have been of the Protestant religion ; but 
he was of the aboriginal race, and not only spoke the Irish 
language, but could pour forth unpremeditated Irish verses. 
Oliver early became, and through his life continued to be, a 
passionate admirer of the Irish music, and especially of the 
compositions of Carolan, some of the last notes of whose 
harp he heard. It ought to be added that Oliver, though 
by birth one of the Englishry, and though connected by 
numerous ties with the Established Church, never showed 
the least sign of that contemptuous antipathy with which, in 
his days, the ruling minority in Ireland too generally re- 
garded the subject majority. So far indeed was he from 
sharing in the opinions and feelings of the caste to which he 
belonged, that he conceived an aversion to the Glorious and 
Immortal Memory, and, when George the Third was on the 
throne, maintained that nothing but the restoration of the 
banished dynasty could save the country. 

From the humble academy kept by the old soldier, Gold- 
smith was removed in his ninth year. He went to several 
grammar-schools, and acquired some knowledge of the 
ancient languages. His life, at this time, seems to have 
been far from happy. He had, as appears from the admira- 



226 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

ble portrait of him at Knowle, features harsh even to ugli- 
ness. The smallpox had set its mark on him with more 
than usual severity. His stature was small, and his limbs 
ill put together. Among boys little tenderness is shown to 
personal defects ; and the ridicule excited by poor Oliver's 
appearance, was heightened by a peculiar simplicity and a 
disposition to blunder which he retained to the last. He 
became the common butt of boys and masters, was pointed 
at as a fright in the play-ground, and flogged as a dunce in 
the school-room. When he had risen to eminence, those 
who had once derided him, ransacked their memory for the 
events of his early years, and recited repartees and couplets 
which had dropped from him, and which, though little no- 
ticed at the time, were supposed, a quarter of a century 
later, to indicate the powers which produced the Vicar of 
Wakefield and the Deserted Village. 

In his seventeenth year Oliver went up to Trinity College, 
Dublin, as a sizar. The sizars paid nothing for food and tui- 
tion, and very little for lodging; but they had to perform 
some menial services from which they have long been re- 
lieved. They swept the court ; they carried up the dinner 
to the fellows' table, and changed the plates and poured out 
the ale of the rulers of the society. Goldsmith was quar- 
tered, not alone, in a garret, on the window of which his 
name, scrawled by himself, is still read witli interest. From 
such garrets many men of less parts than his have made 
their way to the woolsack or to the episcopal bench. But 
Goldsmith, while he suffered all the humiliations, threw 
away all the advantages of his situation. lie neglected the 
studies of the place, stood low at the examinations, was 
turned down to the bottom of his class for playing the buf- 
foon in the lecture-room, was severely reprimanded for 
pumping on a constable, and was caned by a brutal tutor 
for giving a hall in the attie story of the college to some gay 
youths and damsels o\ % the city. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 227 

While Oliver was leading at Dublin a life divided be- 
tween squalid distress and squalid dissipation, his father 
died, leaving a mere pittance. The youth obtained his 
bachelor's degree, and left the university. During some 
time the humble dwelling to which his widowed mother had 
retired was his home. He was now in his twenty-first year ; 
it was necessary that he should do something ; and his edu- 
cation seemed to have fitted him to do nothing but to dress 
himself in gaudy colors, of which he was as fond as a mag- 
pie, to take a hand at cards, to sing Irish airs, to play the 
flute, to angle in summer, and to tell ghost stories by the 
fire in winter. He tried five or six professions in turn with- 
out success. He applied for ordination ; but, as he applied 
in scarlet clothes, he was speedily turned out of the episco- 
pal palace. He then became tutor in an opulent family, 
but soon quitted his situation in consequence of a dispute 
about play. Then he determined to emigrate to America. 
His relations, with much satisfaction, set him out for Cork on 
a good horse, with thirty pounds in his pocket. But in six 
weeks he came back on a miserable hack, without a penny, 
and informed his mother that the ship in which he had 
taken his passage, having got a fair wind while he was at a 
party of pleasure, had sailed without him. Then he re- 
solved to study the law. A generous kinsman advanced 
fifty pounds. With this sum Goldsmith went to Dublin, 
was enticed into a gaming-house, and lost every shilling. 
He then thought of medicine. A small purse was made 
up ; and in his twenty-fourth year he was sent to Edin- 
burgh. At Edinburgh he passed eighteen months in nom- 
inal attendance on lectures, and picked up some superficial 
information about chemistry and natural history. Thence 
he went to Leyden, still pretending to study physic. He 
left that celebrated university, the third university at which 
he had resided, in his twenty-seventh year, without a de- 
gree, with the merest smattering of medical knowledge, and 



228 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

with no property but his clothes and his flute. His flute, 
however, proved a useful friend. He rambled on foot 
through Flanders, France, and Switzerland, playing tunes 
which everywhere set the peasantry dancing, and which 
often procured for him a supper and a bed. He wandered 
as far as Italy. His musical performances, indeed, were 
not to the taste of the Italians ; but he contrived to live on 
the alms which he obtained at the gates of convents. It 
should, however, be observed, that the stories which he told 
about this part of his life ought to be received with great 
caution ; for strict veracity was never one of his virtues ; 
and a man who is ordinarily inaccurate in narration is likely 
to be more than ordinarily inaccurate when he talks about 
his own travels. Goldsmith, indeed, was so regardless of 
truth as to assert in print that he was present at a most 
interesting conversation between Voltaire and Fontenelle, 
and that this conversation took place at Paris. jS'ow it is 
certain that Voltaire never was within a hundred leagues of 
Paris during the whole time which Goldsmith passed on the 
continent. 

In 1756 the wanderer landed at Dover, without a shil- 
ling, without a friend, and without a calling. He had, in- 
deed, if his own unsupported evidence may be trusted, ob- 
tained from the University of Padua, a doctor's degree ; but 
this dignity proved utterly useless to him. In England Ins 
flute was not in request ; there were no convents ; and lie 
was forced to have recourse to a series of desperate expedi- 
ents. He turned strolling player; but his face and figure 
were ill suited to the boards of the humblest theatre. He 
pounded drugs and ran about London with phials tor chari- 
table chemists. He joined a swarm of beggars which made 
its nest in Axe Yard, lie was for a time usher of a school, 
and felt the miseries and humiliations of this situation so 
keenly, that he thought it a promotion to be permitted 
to earn his bread as a bookseller's hack ; but he soon 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 229 

found the new yoke more galling than the old one, and 
was glad to become an usher again. He obtained a 
medical appointment in the service of the East India Com- 
pany ; but the appointment was speedily revoked. Why it 
was revoked we are not told. The subject was one on 
which he never liked to talk. It is probable that he was 
incompetent to perform the duties of the place. Then he 
presented himself at Surgeons' Hall for examination, as 
mate to a naval hospital. Even to so humble a post he was 
found unequal. By this time the schoolmaster whom he had 
served for a morsel of food and the third part of a bed, was 
no more. Nothing remained but to return to the lowest 
drudgery of literature. Goldsmith took a garret in a mis- 
erable court, to which he had to climb from the brink of 
Fleet Ditch by a dizzy ladder of flagstones called Break- 
neck Steps. The court and the ascent have long disap- 
peared ; but old Londoners well remember both. Here, 
at thirty, the unlucky adventurer sat down to toil like a 
galley-slave. 

In the succeeding six years he sent to the press some 
things which have survived, and many which have perished. 
He produced articles for reviews, magazines, and newspa- 
pers ; children's books which, bound in gilt paper and 
adorned with hideous wood-cuts, appeared in the window 
of the once far-famed shop at the corner of St. Paul's 
Churchyard ; An Inquiry into the State of Polite Learning 
in Europe, which, though of little or no value, is still re- 
printed among his works ; a Life of Beau Nash, which is 
not reprinted, though it well deserves to be so ; a superfi- 
cial and incorrect, but very readable History of England, in 
a series of letters purporting to be addressed by a nobleman 
to his son ; and some very lively and amusing Sketches of 
London Society, in a series of letters purporting to be ad- 
dressed by a Chinese traveller to his friends. All these 
works were anonymous ; but some of them were well known 
20 



230 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

to be Goldsmith's ; and he gradually rose in the estimation 
of the booksellers for whom he drudged. He was indeed 
emphatically a popular writer. For accurate research or 
grave disquisition he was not well qualified by nature or by 
education. He knew nothing accurately : his reading had 
been desultory ; nor had he meditated deeply on what he had 
read. He had seen much of the world ; but he had noticed 
and retained little more of what he had seen, than some gro- 
tesque incidents and characters which had happened to strike 
his fancy. But though his mind was very scantily stored with 
materials, he used what materials he had in such a way as to 
produce a wonderful effect. There have been many greater 
writers ; but perhaps no writer was ever more uniformly 
agreeable. His style was always pure and easy, and, on 
proper occasions, pointed and energetic. His narratives 
were always amusing, his descriptions always picturesque, 
his humor rich and joyous, yet not without an occasional 
tinge of amiable sadness. About every tiling that he wrote, 
serious or sportive, there was a certain natural grace and 
decorum, hardly to be expected from a man a great part 
of whose life had been passed among thieves and beg- 
gars, street-walkers and merry -andrews. in those squalid 
dens which are the reproach of great capitals. 

As his name gradually became known, the circle of his 
acquaintance widened. He was introduced to Johnson, who 
was then considered as the first of living English wri: 
to Reynolds, the first of English painters ; and to Rurke. 
who had not yet entered parliament, but had distinguished 
himself greatly by his writings and by the eloquence of his 
conversation. With these eminent men Goldsmith became 
intimate. In 1768, he was one of the nine original mem- 
bers of that celebrated fraternity which has sometime-; been 
called the Literary Club, but wliieh has always disclaimed 
that epithet, and still glories in the simple name of The 
Club. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 231 

l5y this time Goldsmith had quitted his miserable dwell- 
ing at the top of Breakneck Steps, and had taken chambers 
in the more civilized region of the Inns of Court. But he 
was still often reduced to pitiable shifts. Towards the close 
of 1764 his rent was so long in arrear, that his landlady 
one morning called in the help of a sheriff's officer. The 
debtor, in great perplexity, despatched a message to John- 
son ; and Johnson always friendly, though often surly, sent 
back the messenger with a guinea, and promised to follow 
speedily. He came and found that Goldsmith had changed 
the guinea, and was railing at the landlady over a bottle of 
Madeira. Johnson put the cork into the bottle, and en- 
treated his friend to consider calmly how money was to be 
procured. Goldsmith said that he had a novel ready for 
the press. Johnson glanced at the manuscript, saw that 
there were good things in it, took it to a bookseller, sold it 
for 60/. and soon returned with the money. The rent was 
paid and the sheriff's officer withdrawn. According to one 
story, Goldsmith gave his landlady a sharp reprimand for 
her treatment, of him ; according to another he insisted on 
her joining him in a bowl of punch. Both stories are 
probably true. The novel which was thus ushered into the 
world was the Vicar of Wakefield. 

But before the Vicar of Wakefield appeared in print, 
came the great crisis of Goldsmith's literary life. In 
Christmas week, 1764, he published a poem entitled The 
Traveller. It was the first work to which he had put his 
name ; and it at once raised him to the rank of a legitimate 
English classic. The opinion of the most skilful critics was, 
that nothing finer had appeared in verse since the fourth 
book of the Dunciad. In one respect the Traveller differs 
from all Goldsmith's other writings. In general his de- 
signs were bad, and his execution good. In the Traveller, 
the execution, though deserving of much praise, is far infe- 
rior to the design. No philosophical poem, ancient or 



232 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

modern, has a plan so noble, and at the same time so simple. 
An English wanderer, seated on a crag among the Alps, 
near the point where three great countries meet, looks down 
on the boundless prospect, reviews his long pilgrimage, re- 
calls the varieties of scenery, of climate, of government, of 
religion, of national character, which he has observed, and 
comes to the conclusion, just or unjust, that our happiness 
depends little on political institutions, and much on the 
temper and regulation of our own minds. 

While the fourth edition of the Traveller was on the 
counters of the booksellers, the Vicar of Wakefield appeared, 
and rapidly obtained a popularity which has lasted down to 
our own time, and which is likely to last as long as our 
language. The fable is indeed one of the worst that ever 
was constructed. It wants, not merely that probability 
which ought to be found in a tale of common English lit**, 
but that consistency which ought to be found even in the 
wildest fiction about witches, giants, and fairies. But the 
earlier chapters have all the sweetness of pastoral poetry, 
together with all the vivacity of comedy. Moses and his 
spectacles, the vicar and his monogamy, the sharper and 
his cosmogony, the squire proving from Aristotle that rela- 
tives are related, Olivia preparing herself for the arduous 
task of converting a rakish lover by studying the contro- 
versy between Robinson Crusoe and Friday, the great 
ladies with their scandal about Sir Tomkyn'a amours and 
Dr. Burdock's verses, and Mr. Burchell with his " Fudge," 
have caused as much harmless mirth as has ever been 
caused by matter packed into so small a number of pa| 
The latter part of the tale is unworthy of the beginning; 
As we approach tin* catastrophe the absurdities lie thicker 
and thicker, and the gleams of pleasantry become rarer 
and rarer. 

The success which had attended Goldsmith as a novelist 
emboldened him to try his fortune as a dramatist. He 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 233 

wrote the Good-natured Man, a piece which had a worse 
fate than it deserved. Garrick refused to produce it at 
Drury Lane. It was acted at Co vent Garden in 1768, but 
was coldly received. The author, however, cleared by his 
benefit nights, and by the sale of the copyright, no less than 
500/., five times as much as he had made by the Traveller 
and the Vicar of Wakefield together. The plot of the 
Good-natured Man is, like almost all Goldsmith's plots, 
very ill constructed. But some passages are exquisitely 
ludicrous ; much more ludicrous indeed, than suited the taste 
of the town at that time. A canting, mawkish play, entitled 
False Delicacy, had just had an immense run. Sentimen- 
tality was all the mode. During some years, more tears 
were shed at comedies than at tragedies ; and a pleasantry 
which moved the audience to any thing more than a grave 
smile was reprobated as low. It is not strange, therefore, 
that the very best scene in the Good-natured Man, that 
in which Miss Richland finds her lover attended by the 
bailiff and the bailiff's follower in full court dresses, should 
have been mercilessly hissed, and should have been omitted 
after the first night. 

In 1770 appeared the Deserted Village. In mere diction 
and versification this celebrated poem is fully equal, perhaps 
superior, to the Traveller ; and it is generally preferred to 
the Traveller by that large class of readers who think, with 
Bayes in. the Rehearsal, that the only use of a plan is to 
bring in fine things. More discerning judges, however, 
while they admire the beauty of the details, are shocked by 
one unpardonable fault which pervades the whole. The 
fault which we mean is not that theory about wealth and 
luxury which has so often been censured by political econ- 
omists. The theory is indeed false: but the poem, con- 
sidered merely as a poem, is not necessarily the worse on 
that account. The finest poem in the Latin language, in- 
deed, the finest didactic poem in any language, was written 
20* 



234 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

in defence of the silliest and meanest of all systems of nat- 
ural and moral philosophy. A poet may easily be par- 
doned for reasoning ill ; but he cannot be pardoned for de- 
scribing ill, for observing the world in which he lives so 
carelessly that his portraits bear no resemblance to the orig- 
inals, for exhibiting as copies from real life monstrous com- 
binations of things which never were and never could be 
found together. What would be thought of a painter who 
should mix August and January in one landscape, who 
should introduce a frozen river into a harvest scene ? 
Would it be a sufficient defence of such a picture to say 
that every part was exquisitely colored, that the green 
hedges, the apple-trees loaded with fruit, the wagons reel- 
ing under the yellow sheaves, and the sunburned reapers 
wiping their foreheads were very fine, and that the ice, and 
the boys sliding were also very fine? To such a picture the 
Deserted Village bears a great resemblance. It is made up 
of incongruous parts. The village in its happy days is a 
true English village. The village in its decay is an Irish 
village. The felicity and the misery which Goldsmith has 
brought close together belong to two different countries, 
and to two different stages in the progress of society. He 
had assuredly never seen in his native island such a rural 
paradise, such a seat of plenty, content, and tranquillity, as 
his Auburn. He had assuredly never seen in England all 
the inhabitants of such a paradise turned out of their homes 
in one day and forced to emigrate in a body to America. 
The hamlet he had probably seen in Kent ; the ejectment 
he had probably seen in Minister; but by joining the two 
he has produced something which never was and never will 
be seen in any part of the world. 

In 1773, Goldsmith tried his chance at Covent Garden 
with a second play, She Stoops to Conquer. The manager 
was not without great difficulty induced to bring this piece 
out. The sentimental comedy still reigned, and Goldsmith's 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 235 

comedies were not sentimental. The Good-natured Man 
had been too funny to succeed ; yet the mirth of the Good- 
natured Man was sober when compared with the rich droll- 
ery of She Stoops to Conquer, which is, in truth, an incom- 
parable farce in five acts. On this occasion, however, genius 
triumphed. Pit, boxes, and galleries were in a constant 
roar of laughter. If any bigoted admirer of Kelley and 
Cumberland ventured to hiss or groan, he was speedily 
silenced by a general cry of " turn him out " or " throw him 
over." Two generations have since confirmed the verdict 
which was pronounced on that night. 

While Goldsmith was writing the Deserted Village and 
She Stoops to Conquer, he was employed on works of a very 
different kind, works from which he derived little reputation 
but much profit. He compiled for the use of schools a His- 
tory of Home, by which he made 300/., a History of Eng- 
land by which he made 600/., a History of Greece for which 
he received 250/., a Natural History for which the book- 
sellers covenanted to pay him eight hundred guineas. These 
works he produced without any elaborate research, by merely 
selecting, abridging, and translating into his own clear, pure, 
and flowing language, what he found in books well known 
to the world, but too bulky or too dry for boys and girls. 
He committed some strange blunders ; for he knew nothing 
with accuracy. Thus in his History of England he tells us 
that Naseby is in Yorkshire ; nor did he correct this mistake 
when the book was reprinted. He was very nearly hoaxed 
into putting into the History of Greece an account of a 
battle between Alexander the Great and Montezuma. In 
his Animated Nature he relates, with faith and with perfect 
gravity, all the most absurd lies which he could find in books 
of travels about gigantic Patagonians, monkeys that preach 
sermons, nightingales that repeat long conversations. " If he 
can tell a horse from a cow," said Johnson, " that is the 
extent of his knowledge of zoology." How little Goldsmith 



236 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

was qualified to write about the physical sciences is suffi- 
ciently proved by two anecdotes. He on one occasion 
denied that the sun is longer in the northern than in the 
southern signs. It was vain to cite the authority of Mau- 
pertuis. " Maupertuis ! " he cried, " I understand those 
matters better than Maupertuis." On another occasion he, 
in defiance of the evidence of his own senses, maintained 
obstinately, and even angrily, that he chewed his dinner by 
moving his upper jaw. 

Yet ignorant as Goldsmith was, few writers have done 
more to make the first steps in the laborious road to knowl- 
edge easy and pleasant. His compilations are widely dis- 
tinguished from the compilations of ordinary bookmakers. 
He was a great, perhaps an unequalled master of the arts 
of selection and condensation. In these respects his his- 
tories of Rome and of England, and still more his own 
abridgments of these histories, well deserved to be studied. 
In general nothing is less attractive than an epitome ; but 
the epitomes of Goldsmith, even when most concise, are 
always amusing ; and to read them is considered by intelli- 
gent children, not as a task but as a pleasure. 

Goldsmith might now be considered as a prosperous man. 
He had the means of living in comfort, and even in what to 
one who had so often slept in barns and on bulks must havo 
been luxury. His fame was great and was constantly rising. 
He lived in what was intellectually far the best society of 
the kingdom, in a society in which no talent or accomplish- 
ment was wanting, and in which the art of conversation was 
cultivated with splendid success. There probably were 
never lour talkers more admirable in four different wayi 
than Johnson, Burke, Beauclerk, and Garriek ; and Gold- 
smith was oo terms of intimacy with all tour, lie aspired 

to share in their colloquial renown ; but never was ambition 
more Unfortunate. It may seem Strange that a man who 
wrote with so murh perspicuity, vivacity, ami grace, should 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 237 

have been, whenever he took part in conversation, an 
empty, noisy, blundering rattle. But on this point the evi- 
dence is overwhelming. So extraordinary was the contrast 
between Goldsmith's published works and the silly things 
which he said, that Horace Walpole described him as an in- 
spired idiot. " Noll," said Garrick, " wrote like an angel, and 
talked like poor Pol." Chamier declared that it was a hard 
exercise of faith to believe that so foolish a chatterer could 
have really written the Traveller. Even Boswell could say, 
with contemptuous compassion, that he liked very well to 
hear honest Goldsmith run on. " Yes, sir," said Johnson, 
"but he should not like to hear himself." Minds differ as 
rivers differ. There are transparent and sparkling rivers 
from which it is delightful to drink as they flow ; to such 
rivers the minds of such men as Burke and Johnson may be 
compared. But there are rivers of which the water when 
first drawn is turbid and noisome, but becomes pellucid as 
crystal, and delicious to the taste if it be suffered to stand 
till it has deposited a sediment ; and such a river is a type 
of the mind of Goldsmith. His first thoughts on every 
subject were confused even to absurdity, but they required 
only a little time to work themselves clear. When he wrote 
they had that time ; and therefore his readers pronounced 
him a man of genius ; but when he talked, he talked non- 
sense, and made himself the laughing-stock of his hearers. 
He was painfully sensible of his inferiority in conversation ; 
he felt every failure keenly ; yet he had not sufficient judg- 
ment and self-command to hold his tongue. His animal 
spirits and vanity were always impelling him to do the one 
thing which he could not do. After every attempt he felt 
that he had exposed himself, and writhed with shame and 
vexation ; yet the next moment he began again. 

His associates seem to have regarded him with kindness, 
which in spite of their admiration of his writings, was not 
unmixed with contempt. In truth, there was in his charac- 



238 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

ter much to love, but very little to respect. His heart was 
soft even to weakness ; he was so generous that he quite 
forgot to be just ; he forgave injuries so readily that he 
might be said to invite them, and was so liberal to beggars, 
that he had nothing left for his tailor and his butcher. He 
was vain, sensual, frivolous, profuse, improvident. One vice 
of a darker shade was imputed to him, envy. But there is 
not the least reason to believe that this bad passion, though 
it sometimes made him wince and utter fretful exclamations, 
ever impelled him to injure by wicked arts the reputation 
of any of his rivals. The truth probably is, that he was not 
more envious, but merely less prudent than his neighbors. 
His heart was on his lips. All those small jealousies, which 
are but too common among men of letters, but which a man 
of letters who is also a man of the world, does his best to 
conceal, Goldsmith avowed with the simplicity of a child. 
When he was envious, instead of affecting indifference, in- 
stead of damning with faint praise, instead of doing injuries 
slyly and in the dark, he told everybody that lie was envi- 
ous. " Do not, pray, do not talk of Johnson in such terms," 
he said to Boswell ; " you harrow up my very soul." 
George Steevens and Cumberland were men far too cun- 
ning to say such a thing. They would have echoed the 
praises of the man whom they envied, and then have sent 
to the newspapers anonymous libels upon him. But what 
was good and what was bad in Goldsmith's character was to 
his associates a perfect security that he would never commit 
such villany. lie was neither ill-natured enough, nor long- 
headed enough, to be guilty of any malicious act which re- 
quired contrivance and disguise. 

Goldsmith has sometimes been represented as a man of 
genius, cruelly treated by the world, and doomed to struggle 
with difficulties, which at last broke his heart. But no rep- 
resentation can he more remote from the truth. He did, 
indeed, go through much sharp misery before he had done 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 239 

any thing considerable in literature. But after his name had 
appeared on the title-page of the Traveller, he had none but 
himself to blame for his distresses. His average income, 
during the last seven years of his life, certainly exceeded 
400/. a year, and 400/. a year ranked, among the incomes 
of that day, as high as 800/. a year would rank at present. 
A single man living in the Temple, with 400/. a year, might 
then be' called opulent. Not one in ten of the young gen- 
tlemen of good families who were studying the law there 
had so much. But all the wealth which Lord Clive had 
brought from Bengal, and Sir Lawrence Dundas from 
Germany, joined together, would not have sufficed for 
Goldsmith. He spent twice as much as he had. He 
wore fine clothes, gave dinners of several courses, paid 
court to venal beauties. He had also, it should be remem- 
bered, to the honor of his heart, though not of his head, a 
guinea, or five, or ten, according to the state of his purse, 
ready for any tale of distress, true or false. But it was not 
in dress or feasting, in promiscuous amours or promiscuous 
charities, that his chief expense lay. He had been from 
boyhood a gambler, and at once the most sanguine and the 
most unskilful of gamblers. For a time he put off the day 
of inevitable ruin by temporary expedients. He obtained 
advances from booksellers by promising to execute works 
which he never began. But at length this source of supply 
failed. He owed more than 2000/.; and he saw no hope of 
extrication from his embarrassments. His spirits and health 
gave way. He was attacked by a nervous fever, which he 
thought himself competent to treat. It would have been 
happy for him if his medical skill had been appreciated as 
justly by himself as by others. Notwithstanding the degree 
which he pretended to have received at Padua, he could 
procure no patients. " I do not practise," he once said ; " I 
make it a rule to prescribe only for my friends." " Pray, 
dear Doctor," said Beauclerk, " alter your rule ; and pre- 



240 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

scribe only for your enemies." Goldsmith now, in spite 
of this excellent advice, prescribed for himself. The 
remedy aggravated the malady. The sick man was in- 
duced to call in real physicians ; and they at one time 
imagined that they had cured the disease. Still his weak- 
ness and restlessness continued. He could got no sleep. 
He could take no food. " You are worse," said one of his 
medical attendants, " than you should be from the degree of 
fever which you have. Is your mind at ease ? " *' No, it is 
not," were the last recorded words of Oliver Goldsmith. 
He died on the third of April, 1774, in his forty-sixth year. 
He was laid in the churchyard of the Temple ; but the spot 
was not marked by any inscription, and is now forgotten. 
The cotfin was followed by Burke and Reynolds. Both 
these great men were sincere mourners. Burke, when 
he heard of Goldsmith's death, burst into a flood of tears. 
Reynolds had been so much moved by the news, that he flung 
aside his brush and palette for the day. 

A short time after Goldsmith's death, a little poem ap- 
peared, which will, as long as our language lasts, associate 
the names of his two illustrious friends with his own. It 
has already been mentioned that he sometimes felt keenly 
the sarcasm which his wild blundering talk brought upon 
him. He was, not long before his illness, provoked into 
retaliating. He wisely betook himself to his pen ; and at 
that weapon he proved himself a match for all his assailants 
together. Within a small compass he drew with a singularly 
easy and vigorous pencil, the characters of nine or ten of 
his intimate associates. Though this little work did not re- 
ceive his last touches, it must always be regarded as a mas- 
terpiece. It is impossible, however, not to wish that four 
or five likenesses which have no interest for posterity were 
wanting to that noble gallery, and that their places were 
supplied by sketches of Johnson and Gibbon, as happy and 
vivid as the sketches of Burke and Gr&rrick 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 241 

Some of Goldsmith's friends and admirers honored him 
with a cenotaph in Westminster Abbey. Nollekins was 
the sculptor ; and Johnson wrote the inscription. It is 
much to be lamented that Johnson did not leave to pos- 
terity a more durable and a more valuable memorial of 
his friend. A life of Goldsmith would have been an inesti- 
mable addition to the Lives of the Poets. No man appreci- 
ated Goldsmith's writings more justly than Johnson ; no man 
was better acquainted with Goldsmith's character and habits ; 
and no man was more competent to delineate with truth and 
spirit the peculiarities of a mind in which great powers were 
found in company with great weaknesses. But the list of poets 
to whose works Johnson was requested by the booksellers to 
furnish prefaces, ended with Lyttelton, who died in 1773. 
The line seems to have been drawn expressly for the pur- 
pose of excluding the person whose portrait would have 
most fitly closed the series. Goldsmith, however, has been 
fortunate in his biographers. Within a few years his life 
has been written by Mr. Prior, by Mr. Washington Irving, 
and by Mr. Forster. The diligence of Mr. Prior deserves 
great praise ; the style of Mr. Washington Irving is always 
pleasing; but the highest place must, in justice, be assigned 
to the eminently interesting work of Mr. Forster. 

21 



EDWARD GIBBON. 



Edward Gibbon, one of the most celebrated historians 
of any age or country, was also his own historian. He has 
left us one of the most piquant autobiographies ever written. 
In the following sketch the chief incidents of his life will be 
condensed from that authentic source ; for more than facts, 
even for the setting of these, it would be unwise to trust to 
any man's autobiography — though Gibbon's is as frank as 
most. There are points on which vanity will say too much, 
and perhaps others on which modesty will say too little. 

Gibbon was descended, he tells us, from a Kentish family, 
ancient, though not illustrious. His grandfather was a man 
of ability, and an enterprising merchant of London ; one of 
the commissioners of customs in the latter years of Queen 
Anne; and, in the judgment of Lord Bolingbroke. as deeply 
versed in the " finance and commerce of England " as any 
man of his time. He was not always wise, however, either 
lor himself or his country ; for he became deeply involved 
in the South Sea scheme, and lost the ample wealth he had 
amassed, at the explosion of that tremendous bubble (1720). 
As a director of the company, he was suspected of fraudu- 
lent complicity, was taken into custody, and heavily fined; 
but £10,000 were allowed him out of the wreck of his £60,- 
000, and with this his skill and enterprise soon constructed 

(242) 



EDWARD GIBBON. 243 

a second fortune. 1 He died at Putney in 1736, leaving the 
bulk of his property to his two daughters — nearly disinher- 
iting his only son, the father of the historian, for having 
married against his wishes. This son (by name Edward) 
was educated at Westminster and Cambridge, but never 
took a degree ; travelled, became member of parliament, 
first for Petersfield, then for Southampton ; joined the party 
against Sir Robert Walpole, and (as his son confesses, not 
much to his father's honor) was animated in so doing by 
" private revenge," against the supposed " oppressor " of his 
family in the South Sea affair. If so, revenge, as usual, 
was blind ; for Walpole sought rather to moderate than in- 
flame public feeling against the projectors. 

His celebrated son was born at Putney, Surrey, 27th of 
April, 1737. His mother was the daughter of a London 
merchant. Gibbon was the eldest of a family of six sons 
and a daughter, yet was the only one who survived child- 
hood ; and his own life in youth hung by so mere a thread 
as to be a thousand times despaired of. His mother, be- 
tween domestic cares and constant infirmities (which, how- 
ever, did not prevent an occasional plunge into fashionable 
dissipation in compliance with her husband's wishes), did 
but little for him. His true mother, if the expression may 
be permitted, was his maiden aunt — Catherine Porten by 
name — who tenderly nursed his infancy, and, whenever his 
feeble health allowed," took care that his mind should not be 
neglected. " Many anxious and solitary days," says Gibbon, 

1 No less than three of the family intermarried with the Actons of 
Shropshire. " I am thus connected," says Gibbon, "by a triple alli- 
ance with that ancient and loyal family of Shropshire baronets. It 
consisted about that time of seven brothers, all of gigantic stature; 
one of whom, a pigmy of six feet, two inches, confessed himself the 
last and least of the seven ; adding, in the true spirit of party, that 
such men were not born since the revolution." — Memoirs, Vol. I. p. 
10. 



244 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

" did she consume with patient trial of every mode of relief 
and amusement. Many wakeful nights did she sit by my 
bedside in trembling expectation that each hour would be 
my last." 1 At seven he was committed for eighteen months 
to the care of a private tutor, John Kirkby by name, and 
the author, among other things, of a " philosophical fiction" 
entitled the Life of Automathes. The illustrious pupil 
speaks gratefully of his tutor, and doubtless truly, so far as 
he could trust the impressions of his childhood. Of the 
" philosophical fiction " he says, " The author is not entitled 
to the merit of invention since he has blended the English 
story of Robinson Crusoe with the Arabian romance of Hai 
Ebn Yokhdan which he might have read in the Latin ver- 
sion of Pococke. In the Automathes I cannot praise either 
the depth of thought or elegance of style ; but the book is 
not devoid of entertainment or instruction." 2 

At nine (1746), during a "lucid interval of health," he was 
sent to a school at Kingston-on-Thames ; but the usual breaks 
of sickness intervened, and his progress, by his own confes- 
sion, was slow and unsatisfactory. " My timid reserve was 
astonished by the crowd and tumult of the school ; the want 
of strength and activity disqualified me for the sports of the 

play-field By the common methods of discipline, at 

the expense of many tears and some blood, I purchased the 
knowledge of the Latin syntax ; and not long since I was 
possessed of the dirty volumes of Phccdrus and Cornelius Ne- 
pos which I painfully construed and darkly understood.'' 3 

In 1747 his mother died, and he was taken home. 
After a short time his father removed from Putney to 
the "rustic solitude" of Buriton, and young Gibbon ac- 
companied him. There probably his health was benefited, 
and his mind certainly received its first decided stimulus. 
In these early years, under the care of his devoted aunt, he 

i Memoirs, Vol. 1. p. 19. - lb. p. 21, 82. 3 lb. p. 22. 



EDWARD GIBBON. 245 

first acquired, he tells us, that passionate love of reading 
" which he would not exchange for all the treasures of In- 
dia." He read at will ; and there are minds to which it is 
the best possible schooling. To be turned loose to graze in 
the free mountain pasture, to "browse" at pleasure — as 
Charles Lamb expresses it — in a library of wholesome liter- 
ature, tends more than any thing else, if not to discipline, to 
stimulate their powers ; and often not only tinctures, but de- 
termines the whole future. It was so with Gibbon. After de- 
tailing the circumstances which " unlocked" for him the door 
of his grandfather's " tolerable library," he says, " I turned 
over many English pages of poetry and romance, of history 
and travels. Where a title attracted my eye, without fear or 
awe I snatched the volume from the shelf." 1 In 1749, in his 
twelfth year, he was sent to Westminster, still residing, how- 
ever, with his aunt, who, unwilling to live a life of depend- 
ence, had opened a boarding-house for Westminster school. 
"In the space of two years (1749-50), interrupted by dan- 
ger and debility, I painfully climbed into the third form ; and 
my riper age was left to acquire the beauties of the Latin 
and the rudiments of the Greek tongue." 2 The continual 
attacks of sickness which had retarded his progress induced 
his aunt, by medical advice, to take him to Bath ; but the 
mineral waters had no effect. He then resided for a time in 
the house of a physician in Winchester ; the physician did 
as little as the mineral waters ; and, after a further trial of 
Bath, he once more returned to Putney, and made a last fu- 
tile attempt to study at Westminster. Finally, it was re- 
solved that he would never be able to encounter the discipline 
of a school; and casual instructors, at various times and 
places, were provided for him. The snatches of his youth 
that could be given to mental effort were doubtless pretty 
well filled up by himself, and, for the reasons already as- 

1 Memoirs, Vol. I. p. 25. 2 lb. p. 27. 

21* 



246 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

signed, perhaps not unpropitiously in relation to the peculiar 
character of his intellect and the requirements of his subse- 
quent career. 

Towards his sixteenth year he tells us that all his infirmi- 
ties suddenly vanished. u Nature," as he frigidly expresses 
it, * displayed in my favor her mysterious energies." His 
education was now resumed under the roof of Francis, the 
translator of Horace ; of whose negligence as a tutor the 
historian speaks most strongly. " The translator of Horace," 
says he, " might have taught me to relish the Latin poets, had 
not my friends discovered in a few weeks that he preferred 
the pleasures of London to the instruction of his pupils." 1 

Gibbon was then sent to finish his education (before it 
had been properly begun) at Oxford, where he matriculated 
as gentleman commoner of Magdalen College, April, 1752. 
His description of his intellectual condition at that time is 
curious enough : " I arrived there with a stock of erudition 
which might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of igno- 
rance of which a school-boy might have been ashamed." It 
was natural. He had read extensively, though at random ; 
and, his memory being tenacious, he had amassed much knowl- 
edge, though of a very miscellaneous character. It seems, 
however, that during the three previous years his youthful 
mind had received a determinate direction, either from its 
own secret tendencies, or from the class of works on which 
he accidentally lighted, or more probably from both causes. 
His taste was already fixed where it never afterwards 
wavered — on history. 

His list of the books which, during the three years of 
self-prompted and wandering- study, he had more or less 
devoured, is amazingly miscellaneous : but we have no space 
to give it. The reader may find it in the Mc/tioirs. Many 
of them both for their extent and dryness, would have been 

1 Memoirs, Vol. I. p. 88. 



EDWARD GIBBON. 247 



: 



repulsive enough to most lads of his age. Most of the 
classical historians accessible in translations, not forgetting a 
" ragged Procopius " which chanced to fall in his way, and 
" many crude lumps," as he oddly expresses it, of the most 
voluminous modern historians, as Davila, Rapin, Father 
Paul, Machiavel, were hastily gulped — giving in those days, 
doubtless, but little trouble in the digestion. " I devoured 
them," he says, " like so many novels ; and I swallowed 
with the same voracious appetite the description of India 
and China, of Mexico and Peru." * At the same period his 
fancy kindled with the first glimpses into oriental history, the 
wild " barbaric " charm of which he never ceased to feel. 
India, China, Arabia, and especially the career of Mohammed, 
successively attracted his attention. Ockley's book on the 
Saracens "first opened his eyes " to this last subject; and 
with his characteristic ardor of literary research, he forthwith 
plunged into the French of D'Herbelot, and the Latin of 
Pococke's version of Abulfaragius — sometimes " guessing," 
and sometimes understanding — now swimming, now wading 
up to his <min, and now plunging out of his depth altogether. 
His first introduction to the historic scenes which afterwards 
formed the passion of his life, took place at the same period. 
In 1751, he notes his "discovery" of a " common book " — 
Echard's Roman History. 2 " To me," he says, " the reigns 
of the successors of Constantine were absolutely new ; and I 
was immersed in the passage of the Goths over the Danube, 
when the summons of the dinner bell reluctantly dragged 
me from my intellectual feast." 

He seems even then to have adopted the plan of study he 
followed in after-life and recommended in his Essai sur 
V Etude ; that is, of letting his subject rather than his author 
determine his course ; of suspending the perusal of a book 
to reflect, and to compare the statements with those of other 

i Memoirs, Vol. I. p. 30. 2 lb. p. 30. 



248 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

authors ; so that he often read portions of fifty volumes 
while mastering one. Where the mind has vigor and per- 
severance to adopt this course, it is, without doubt, the most 
profitable of all modes of reading. A man rarely forgets 
what he has taken so much trouble to acquire. The chase 
itself, too, and the variety of forms in which knowledge is 
presented, afford a thousand links by which association aids 
memory. 

But Gibbon's huge wallet of scraps stood him in little stead 
at the trim banquets to which he was invited at Oxford ;,and 
the wandering habit by which he had filled it absolutely un- 
fitted him to be a guest. He was not well grounded in any 
of the elementary branches which are essential to univer- 
sity studies, and to all success in their prosecution. It was 
natural, therefore, that he should dislike the university, and 
as natural that the university should dislike him. Many of 
his complaints of the system were certainly just ; but it may 
be doubted whether any university system would have been 
profitable to him, considering his antecedents. He com- 
plains of his tutors, too, and in one case with abundant rea- 
son ; but, by his own confession, they had equal reason to 
complain of him, for he indulged in gay society, and kept 
late hours. His observations, however, on the defects of our 
university system in general, are acute and well worth pon- 
dering, however little relevant to his own case. Many of 
these defects, in the case of our own universities, haw been 
removed since his time, and some very recently. lie re- 
mained at Magdalen about fourteen months. "To the Uni- 
versity of Oxford," he says, "I acknowledge no obligation ; 
and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son as I am 
willing to disclaim her for a mother. 1 spent fourteen 
months at Magdalen College ; they proved the fourteen 
months the most idle and unprofitable in inv whole lite. 1 

1 Mmoin, Vol. I. p. 34. 



EDWARD GIBBON. 249 

But little as he did as a student, he already meditated au- 
thorship. In the first long vacation — " during which," he 
says, (whimsically enough,) " his taste for books began to 
revive," — he resolved to write a treatise on The Age of Se- 
sostris ; 1 in which (and it was characteristic) his chief object 
was to investigate the probable epoch of that semi-mythical 
monarch's reign. " Unprovided with original learning, unin- 
formed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of 
composition, I resolved to write a book." He long after- 
wards (November, 1772), but wisely, no doubt, " committed 
the sheets to the flames." Literary ambition almost uniformly 
displays its early energy in some such crude project, and 
Gibbon was no exception to the rule. This period of his 
life was also signalized by another premature attempt to 
solve difficulties beyond the age of sixteen. He read Mid- 
dleton's Free Inquiry ; and this, strange to say, repelled him 
from Protestantism, and gave him a bias towards Rome ; he 
read Bossuet's Variations of Protestantism, and Exposition 
of Catholic Doctrine, and these completed his conversion, 
"and surely," he adds, "I fell by a noble hand." In this 
notable victory, however, of the Bishop of Meaux over a youth 
of sixteen, there is nothing wonderful ; nor was Bossuet 
the only champion of Borne who helped to lay him low, for 
he attributes not a little to the perusal of the works of Par- 
sons, the Jesuit. But the inexperience, perhaps wayward- 
ness of youth, and impatience to have doubts hushed and 
quelled, if not removed, had probably more to do with this 
transient conquest, than all the above controvertists put 
together. 

No sooner converted, than he confessed. He certainly 
practised none of the reserve of the Jesuit to whom he had 
been so much indebted. On June 8, 1753, he records that 
he " privately abjured the heresies " of his childhood before 

1 Memoirs, Vol. I. p. 41. 



250 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

a Catholic priest in London, and announced the same to his 
father in a somewhat grandiloquent effusion, which his 
spiritual adviser much approved, and in which it is probable 
he had some share. " Gibbon," says Lord Sheffield, " de- 
scribed the letter to his father, announcing his conversion, as 
written with all the pomp, the dignity, and self-satisfaction 
of a martyr." * His father heard with indignant surprise of 
this act of juvenile apostasy, and indiscreetly giving vent to 
his wrath, the authorities of Oxford dismissed the neophvtc. 
It is curious to read Gibbon's rather complacent estimate in 
after-life of this " sacrifice of self-interest to conscience." 
It is expressed in terms which might almost tempt one to 
think that he scarcely contemplated his subsequent changes 
with equal satisfaction. Yet he also seems to have felt that 
the infirmities of reason which this escapade implied needed 
some apology, and that the applause of conscience hardly com- 
pensated for the reflections on his logic. He therefore justi- 
fies his apostasy by the parallel vacillations of Chillingworth 
and Bayle. " He could not blush," he says, " that his tender 
mind was entangled in the sophistry which had seduced the 
acute and manly understandings of a Chillingworth or a 
Bayle ; " 2 of which he takes care to inform us that the latter 
was twenty-two, and the former of the " ripe age " of twenty- 
eight years, when caught in the meshes of Romanism. 

In short, he attached rather too much importance to the 
fluctuations of sixteen. As a fact in the history of his own 
mind, however, it is of interest ; in any other light, of no 
importance whatever. ''To my present feelings," lie tells 
us in his Memoirs, " it seems incredible that 1 should < 
believe that I believed in transubstantiation," that is it' he 
were interpreted rigorously, " he could not believe that he 
could ever belie re that he beliered in transubstantiation." 
If that were his meaning, lie had certainly cured himself of 
all superfluous facility of belief. 

i Memoir*, Vol. I. p. 46. 2 Ih. p. 47. 



EDWARD GIBBON. 251 

It was now high time that his education, so nearly finished 
in name, should be begun in earnest. But as one chief ob- 
ject of his father was to secure in the course of it his recon- 
version to Protestantism, he was consigned (1753) to the 
care of a Calvinist minister at Lausanne — a M. Pavilliard, 
of whom Gibbon speaks in strong terms of affection and 
esteem, and who appears to have deserved them. There 
was one slight obstacle to be sure, to the intercourse of tutor 
and pupil ; M. Pavilliard appears to have known little of 
English, and young Gibbon knew nothing of French. But 
this difficulty was soon removed by the pupil's diligence; 
the very exigencies of his situation were of service to him, 
and he studied the language with such success, that at the 
close of his five years' exile he declares that he " spontane- 
ously thought " in French rather than in English, and that 
it had become more familiar to " ear, pen, and tongue." It 
is well known that in after years he had doubts whether he 
should not compose his great work in French; and it is 
certain that his familiarity with that language, in spite of 
considerable efforts to counteract its effects, tinged his style 
to the last. 

Under the judicious regulations of his new tutor a sys- 
tematic course of study was marked out, and was most ar- 
dently prosecuted. The pupil's progress was proportion- 
ably rapid. With the systematic study of the Latin and 
Greek classics he conjoined that of French literature, which 
he read largely though somewhat indiscriminately. 

Nor was the object his father primarily had at heart less 
effectually attained. To his large reading of the classics he 
added a diligent study of logic in the prolix system of 
Crousaz, and further invigorated his reasoning powers, as 
well as enlarged his knowledge of metaphysics and juris- 
prudence by the perusal of Locke, Grotius, and Montes- 
quieu. He also read about this time Pascal's Provincial 
Letters, and at sixty he declares he had reperused them 



252 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

almost every year with new pleasure. It is one of the 
" three books " which, by his own confession, probably con- 
tributed, in a " special sense, to form the historian of the 
Roman HJmpire." From Pascal, he flatters himself, he 
"learned to manage the weapons of grave and temperate 
irony, even on subjects of ecclesiastical solemnity ; " a grand 
mistake as regards both the adroitness with which he used 
and the subject on which he employed the weapon. There 
is as much difference between the light grace of Pascal's 
irony and the heavy, labored movement of Gibbon's, as 
between an Arab courser and a Flanders war-horse. He 
also studied mathematics to some extent, though purely in 
compliance with his father's wishes. He advanced as far 
as the conic sections in the treatise of L'Hopital. He as- 
sures us that his tutor did not complain of any inaptitude 
on the pupil's part, and that the pupil was as happily uncon- 
scious of any on his own ; but here he broke off. He adds, 
what is not quite clear from one who so frankly acknowl- 
edges his limited acquaintance with the science, that he had 
reason to congratulate himself that he knew no more. " A- 
soon," he says, " as I understood the principles, I relin- 
quished forever the pursuit of the mathematics ; nor can I 
lament that I desisted before my mind was hardened by the 
habit of rigid demonstration, so destructive of the liner feel- 
ings of moral evidence, which must, however, determine the 
actions and opinions of our lives." l 

There is no doubt that the sort of evidence witli which 
the future historian was called to deal has to do with proba- 
bilities and not rigid ''demonstration ;" but whether he would 
not have sometimes computed its elements with more im- 
partiality and precision if he had had a little further train- 
ing in the exact sciences, may be a question. 

Under the new influences which were brought to bear on 

i Mmoin, Vol. I. j>. 66. 



EDWARD GIBBON. 253 

him, he resumed in less than a twelvemonth his Protestant- 
ism. " He is willing," he says, to allow M. Pavilliard a 
"handsome share in his reconversion," though he stoutly 
avows that it was principally due to his own " solitary reflec- 
tions." He particularly congratulated himself on having 
discovered a " philosophical argument " against "transubstan- 
tiation." It was " that the text of Scripture which seems to 
inculcate the real presence is attested only by a single sense 
— our sight ; while the real presence itself is disproved by 
three of our senses — the sight, the touch, and the taste." x 
It is possible that the unconscious influence of the threats 
of disinheritance, and the exchange of his " handsome apart- 
ments at Magdalen " for the meanness and discomforts of 
his Swiss home, may have been quite as efficacious as this 
curious enthymeme. Thus was he converted to Romanism 
in his sixteenth year, and recanted his recantation in his 
seventeenth. The changes were doubtless important to 
him, and it was natural that he should give them some 
prominence in his "autobiography;" but relatively to the 
great questions they involve, the oscillations of such a 
youthful mind, however intelligent, are of as little moment 
as the transfer of a cypher from one side of an equation to 
the other. 

Two circumstances specially signalized his residence at 
Lausanne — he saw Voltaire, and he fell in love. " Virgil- 
ium vidi tantum" says he ; but his admiration of Voltaire's 
writings was great, and exerted a rather equivocal influence 
on his poetic tastes. It led to an excessive estimate of the 
French drama, and abated, he scruples not to declare, his 
"idolatry for the gigantic genius of Shakspeare." Vol- 
taire's writings also probably gave him a false bias in mat- 
ters of infinitely more importance than those of literature. 

His love affair — his first and only one — was transient 

1 Memoirs, Vol. I. p. 58. 
22 



254 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

enough. The young lady, in the bloom of sixteen, the 
daughter of a Swiss pastor, was Mademoiselle Curchod, 
afterwards the wife of the celebrated M. Necker. She 
was, as Gibbon declares (and we know it on better testi- 
mony than a lover's eyes), beautiful, intelligent, and ac- 
complished. Her charms, however, do not seem to have 
made any indelible impression on our young student, whose 
sensibility, to say the truth, was never very profound. On 
his father's expressing his disapprobation, he surrendered 
the object of his affection w 7 ith as little resistance as he had 
surrendered his Romanism. " I sighed," he says, " as a 
lover, but obeyed as a son." It would be invidious to in- 
stitute comparisons as to the merit of " faithful love " and 
filial devotion; but, if the one be unrewarded by fortune, 
and the other stimulated by menaces, it is a difficult choice 
no doubt, for any but a hero ; and Gibbon neither then nor 
afterwards was a hero. " Without my father's consent," he 
plaintively says, " I was destitute and helpless." 

Unwearied application to study was the best u remedium 
amoris," if indeed he stood in need of any remedy. In any 
case, his diligence was most commendable, and no one can 
read the account of the three last years spent at Lausanne, 
and especially the all but incredible toils of the last eight 
months, without perceiving that the foundations of that vast 
erudition which the Decline and Fall demanded, were 
effectually laid; or hesitate to give our student a worthy 
place with the Scaligers, Huets, and Leibnitzes, of the pre- 
ceding century. Though there may be a little unconscious 
exaggeration in his statement of the achievements of these 
miraculous eight months, we are tempted to give it in a note 
for the encouragement or despair of other youthful students. 1 

1 He says in his Journal, "December 4, 1755, — "In finishing this 
year, I must remark how favorable it was to my studies. In the 
space of eight months, from the beginning of April, I learned the 
principles of drawing ; made myself complete master of the French 



EDWARD GIBBON. 255 

In 1758 he returned to England, and was kindly re- 
ceived at home. But he found a stepmother there ; and 
this apparition on his father's hearth at first rather appalled 
him. The cordial and gentle manners of Mrs. Gibbon, 
however, and her unremitted study of his happiness, won 
him from his first prejudices, and gave her a permanent 
place both in his esteem and affection. He seems to have 
been much indulged, and led a very pleasant life of it ; he 
pleased himself in moderate excursions, frequented the theatre, 
mingled, though not very often, in society ; was sometimes 
a little extravagant, and sometimes a little dissipated, but 
never lost the benefits of his Lausanne exile ; and with the 
exception of a few transient youthful irregularities, settled 
into a sober, discreet, calculating epicurean philosopher, who 
sought the summum bonum, of man in temperate, regulated, 
and elevated pleasure. The two years after his return to 
England he spent principally at his father's country-seat at 
Buriton, in Hampshire, only, nine months being given to the 
metropolis. He has left an amusing account of his employ- 
ments in the country, where his love of study was at once 
inflamed by a library rich enough to make him contrast its 
treasures with the poverty of Lausanne, and checked by the 
necessary interruptions of his otherwise happy domestic life. 
After breakfast " he was expected," he says, " to spend an 

and Latin languages, with which I was very superficially acquainted 
before, and wrote and translated a great deal in both ; read Cicero's 
Epistles Ad Famiiiares, his Brutus, all his Orations, his Dialogues 
De Amicitid and De Senectute ; Terence, twice ; and Pliny's Epistles. 
In French, Giannone's History of Naples, and l'Abbe Bannier's My- 
thology, and M. De Bochat's Memoir-es sur la Suisse, and wrote a very 
ample relation of my tour. I likewise began to study Greek, and 
went through the grammar. I began to make very large collections 
of what I read. But what I esteem most of all, from the perusal and 
meditation of De Crousaz's Logic, I not only understood the princi- 
ples of that science, but formed my mind to a habit of thinking and 
reasoning I had no idea of before." — Memoirs, p. 61. 



256 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

hour with Mrs. Gibbon — read the paper to his father in 
the afternoon — was often called down to entertain idle 
visitors — and, worst of all, was periodically compelled to 
return the visits of their more distant neighbors." He says 
he dreaded the " recurrence of the full moon," which was 
the period generally selected for the more convenient ac- 
complishment of such formidable excursions. 

His father's library, though large in comparison with that 
he commanded at Lausanne, contained, he says, "much 
trash," which he gradually weeded out, and transformed it 
at length into that " numerous and select " library which 
was " the foundation of his works, and the best comfort of his 
life at home and abroad." No sooner had he returned home 
than he began the work of accumulation, and records that, 
on the receipt of his first quarter's allowance, a large share 
was appropriated to his literary wants. " He could never 
forget," he declares, " the joy with which he exchanged a 
bank-note of twenty pounds for the twenty volume- of the 
Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions." It may not be 
unprofitable here to remark that the principles on which he 
selected his admirable library are worthy of every student's 
attention. " I am not conscious," says he, " of having ever 
bought a book from a motive of ostentation ; every volume 
before it was deposited on the shelf was either read or sulli- 
ciently examined." The account he gives of his mode of 
study is also deeply instructive, but there is not space for it 
here. 

In London he seems to have seen but little select society — 
partly because his father's habits opened to him but little 
that he eared for — partly from his own reserve and timid- 
ity, increased by his foreign education. This had made 
English habits unfamiliar and the very language in some 
degree Btrange. And thus it was that he draws that inter- 
esting picture of the literary recluse among the crowds of 
London: "While coaches were rattling through Bond 



EDWARD GIBBON* 257 

Street, I have passed many a solitary evening in my lodg- 
ing with my books. My studies were sometimes interrupted 
with a sigh, which I breathed towards Lausanne ; and on 
the approach of spring I withdrew without reluctance from 
the noisy and extensive scene of crowds without company, 
and dissipation without pleasure." * He became acquainted, 
however, with Mallet — by courtesy called the " poet " — 
and through him gained access to Lady Hervey's circle, 
where a congenial admiration, not to say affectation, of 
French manners and literature*, made him a welcome guest. 
In one respect Mallet gave him good counsel. He advised 
him to addict himself to an arduous study of the more 
idiomatic English writers — Swift and Addison, for example 
— with a view to unlearn his foreign idiom, and recover his 
half-forgotten vernacular ; — a task, which he never per- 
fectly accomplished. Much as he admired these writers, 
Hume and Robertson were still greater favorites, as well 
from their subject as for their style. Of his admiration of 
Hume's style — of its nameless grace of simple elegance — 
he has left us a strong expression, when he tells us that it 
often compelled him to close the historian's volumes with a 
feeling of despair. 

In 1761 Gibbon, after many delays, and with many flut- 
terings of hope and fear, gave to the world, in French, his 
maiden publication, composed two years before. It was 
partly in compliance with his father's wishes, who thought 
that the proof of some literary talent might introduce him 
favorably to public notice, and " secure the recommendation 
of his friends." But in yielding to paternal authority, 
Gibbon frankly owns that he complied, " like a pious son — 
with the wish of his own heart." 

The subject of the Essai sur Vetude de la Litterature w T as 
suggested, its author says, by a refinement of vanity — " the 

? Memoirs, Vol. I. p. 81 . 
22* 



258 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

desire of justifying and praising the object of a favorite pur- 
suit." Partly owing to its being written in French, partly 
to its character, the essay excited more attention abroad than 
at home. Gibbon has criticized it with the utmost frank- 
ness, not to say severity, but after every abatement, it is 
unquestionably a surprising effort for a mind so young, and 
contains many thoughts which would not have disgraced 
a thinker or scholar of much maturer age. The account of 
its first reception and subsequent history in England de- 
serves to be cited as amongst the curiosities of literature. 
" In England," he says, " it was received with cold indiffer- 
ence, little read, and speedily forgotten ; a small impression 
was slowly dispersed ; the bookseller murmured, and the 
author (had his feelings been more exquisite) might have 
wept over the blunders and baldness of the English transla- 
tion. The publication of my history fifteen years afterwards 
revived the memory of my first performance, and the essay 
was eagerly sought in the shops. But I refused the per- 
mission which Becket solicited of reprinting it : the public 
curiosity was imperfectly satisfied by a pirated copy of the 
booksellers of Dublin ; and when a copy of the original 
edition has been discovered in a sale, the primitive value of 
half a crown has risen to the fanciful price of a guinea or 
thirty shillings." * 

Just before the publication of the essay. Gibbon entered a 
new, and, one might suppose, a very uncongenial scene of 
life. He became a captain in the Hampshire militia; and 
for more than two years led a life of march and counter- 
march in the southern counties of England. Hampshire, 
Kent, Wiltshire, and Devonshire, formed the successive 
theatres of what he calls his "bloodless and inglorious Cam- 
paigns." He nevertheless, justly describes it as a lite of 
" military servitude," as the term of service was prolonged 

1 tfmoin, Vol. I. p. 90. 



EDWARD GIBBON. 259 

far beyond the period he had contemplated, and the mode 
of life utterly alien from all his pursuits as a scholar and a 
student. " In the act," says he, " of offering our names and 
receiving our commissions, as major and captain in the 
Hampshire regiment (June 12, 1759), we had not supposed 
that we should be dragged away, my father from his 
farm, myself from my books, and condemned during two 
years and a half (May 10, 1760, to December 23, 1762), 
to a wandering life of military servitude." * He has left us 
an amusing account of the busy idleness in which his time 
was spent ; but, considering the circumstances, so adverse to 
study, one is rather surprised that our military student 
should have done so much, than that he did so little ; 2 and 
never probably before were so many hours of literary study 
spent in a tent. In estimating the comparative advantages 
and disadvantages of this wearisome period of his life, he 
has summed up with the sagacity of a man of the world, and 
the impartiality of a philosopher. Irksome as were his em- 
ployments, grievous as was the waste of time, uncongenial 
as were his companions, solid benefits were to be set off 
against these things ; his health became robust, his knowl- 
edge of the world was enlarged, he wore off some of his 
foreign idiom, got rid of much of his reserve ; he adds, — 
and perhaps in his estimate it was the benefit to be most 
prized of all, — " the discipline and evolutions of a modern 
battalion gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and the 
legion, and the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers (the 

1 Memoirs, Vol. I. p. 95. 

2 The notes of his Journal at this period are worth reading, as 
curiously illustrative of his indomitable literary industry. "My 
example/' he says, " might prove that in the life most averse to study 
some hours may be stolen, some minutes may be snatched. Amidst 
the tumult of Winchester camp I sometimes thought and read in my 
tent; in the more settled quarters of the Devizes, Blandford, and 
Southampton, I always secured a separate lodging, and the necessary 
books." — lb. p. 104. 



260 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of 
the Roman Empire." In 1762, while the new militia was 
forming, he " enjoyed two or three months of literary re- 
pose," and flew to his books with an appetite sharpened by 
his long fast. In pursuing a plan of study at this period, 
he hesitated between the prosecution of mathematics and 
Greek ; it was but for a moment. As might be anticipated, 
Homer carried the day against Newton and Leibnitz. 

Nothing can better illustrate the intensity of Gibbon's 
literary ambition — his only strong passion — than the num- 
ber of literary projects with which his mind was teeming 
even in camp. He enumerates amongst others a history of 
the expedition of Charles VIII. of France ; the crusade of 
Richard the Lion-hearted ; the wars of the barons ; and 
lives of the Black Prince, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter 
Raleigh, and Montrose. These are only a portion of the 
subjects he revolved with the same view. They show by 
their number how strong was the impulse to literature, and 
by their character, how determined the bent of his mind in 
the direction of history. 

The militia was disbanded in 1763, and he joyfully shook 
off his bonds ; but his literary projects were still to be post- 
poned. Following his own wishes, though with his father's 
consent, he had projected a continental tour as the comple- 
tion " of an English gentleman's education." This had 
been interrupted by the episode of the militia. He now 
resumed his purpose and left England in 1763. Two years 
were "loosely defined as the term of his absence," which he 
exceeded by half a year — returning June, 17f>r>. He first 
Visited Paris, where he saw a good deal of D'Alcinla it, 
Diderot, Barthelemv, Raynal, Ilelvetius. Baron dTIolbaoh, 
and others of the saint 1 Bel ; and was often a welcome guest 

in the saloons of Mesdamea Geofirin and Du Defiand. 1 Vol- 

1 This lady, though blind — "l'aveugle clairvoyante/' as Voltaire 
happily mils her — recognised with exquisite tart the self-hotrayinp 



EDWARD GIBBON. 261 

taire was at Geneva, Rousseau at Montmorency, and Buffon 
he neglected to visit ; but the above names are enough to 
justify the suspicion that the hostility which he afterwards 
evinced towards Christianity may in part be attributed to 
the influence of such society. How well he liked Paris is 
evident from his own statements : " Fourteen weeks insen- 
sibly stole away ; but had I been rich and independent, I 
should have prolonged and perhaps have fixed my residence 
at Paris." 1 

From France he proceeded to Switzerland, and revisited 
his friends at Lausanne; thence to Italy in 1764. The ac- 
count of his feelings on approaching Rome — how like in 
intensity to those of Luther on a similar occasion, and yet 
of how different a character ! — is deeply interesting. His 
emotions, he says, were not " enthusiastic," and yet became, 
as he confesses, almost " uncontrollable." While here, his 
long yearning for some great theme worthy of bis historic 
genius was gratified. The first conception of the Decline 
and Fall arose as he lingered one evening amidst the ves- 
tiges of ancient glory ; but his precise words cannot be 
omitted in any sketch of Gibbon, however brief: — "It was 
at Rome," says he, "on the loth of October, 1764, as I sat 
musing amidst the ruins of the capitol, while the barefooted 
friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that 
the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first 
started to my mind." M. Suard fancifully attributes to the 
combination of circumstances under which the conception of 
the work arose, some of that inveterate hatred of Chris- 
solicitude of Gibbon to catch the exact tone of French manners and 
society. She thus speaks in a letter to Walpole : "He sets too much 
value on our talents for society (nos agreements), shows too much desire 
of acquiring them ; it is constantly on the tip of my tongue to say to 
him, ' Do not put yourself to so much trouble ; you deserve the honor 
of being a Frenchman.' " 

1 Memoirs, p. 117. 



262 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

tianity which pervades it. " Struck with a first impression," 
he says, " Gibbon, in writing the Decline and Fall of the 
Empire, saw in Christianity only an institution which had 
placed vespers, barefooted friars, and processions, in the 
room of the magnificent ceremonies of Jupiter, and the tri- 
umphs of the Capitol." 

Others attributed it in part to the conservative quality of 
his politics, which led him to regard Christianity as a *' dar- 
ing innovation." It seems probable that his tendencies and 
habits of mind, which were eminently favorable to skepti- 
cism, and the society in which he had early moved (and 
especially of late in the saloons of Paris), had much more 
to do with the result than either of these causes. 

About five years after his return home his father died 
(1770). This is the period of his life which he says he 
passed with the least enjoyment, and remembered with the 
least satisfaction. He attended " every spring the meetings 
of the militia at Southampton, — and rose successively to 
the rank of major and lieutenant-colonel ; " but was each 
year " more disgusted with the inn, the wine, the company, 
and the tiresome repetition of annual attendance and daily 
exercise." From his own account, however, it appears that 
other and deeper causes produced his ennui. Sincerely at- 
tached to his home, he yet felt the anomaly of his position. 
At thirty, still a dependant, without a settled occupation, 
without a definite social status, he often regretted that he 
had not embraced some profession : '• From the emoluments 
of a profession," he says, "I might have derived an ample 
fortune, or a competent income, instead of being stinted to 
the same narrow allowance, to be increased only l>y an event 
which I sincerely deprecate." * Doubtless the secret tire of 
a consuming, but as yet ungratitied, literary ambition also 
troubled his repose. 

1 Memoirs, p. 132, 



EDWARD GIBBON. 263 

He still " contemplated at awful distance " The Decline 
and Fall ; and, meantime, revolved other subjects. Hesi- 
tating between the revolutions of Florence and Switzerland, 
he consulted M. Deyverdun, a young Swiss with whom he 
had been intimate during his first residence at Lausanne, 
and decided in favor of the land which was his " friend's by 
birth " and " his own by adoption." He executed the first 
book in French ; it was read as an anonymous production 
before a literary society of foreigners in London, and con- 
demned. Gibbon sat and listened to their strictures. It 
never got beyond that rehearsal ; and though Hume encour- 
aged him to proceed, Gibbon declared the sentence just, and 
declined. 

In 1767, he joined with M. Deyverdun in starting the 
Memoirs Litteraires de la Grande Bretagne. But its cir- 
culation was limited, and only two volumes had appeared 
when Deyverdun went abroad. The materials already col- 
lected for a third volume were suppressed. It may be inter- 
esting to the reader to know that in the first volume is a 
review by Gibbon of Lord Lyttleton's History of Henry II. 

The next appearance of the historian made a deeper im- 
pression. It was the first distinct print of the lion's foot. 
" Ex ungue leonem " might have been justly said, for he 
attacked, and attacked successfully, the redoubtable War- 
burton. Of the many paradoxes in the Divine Legation, 
none is more extravagant than the theory that Virgil in the 
sixth book of his iEneid intended to allegorize, in the visit 
of his hero and the sybil to the shades, the initiation of 
iEneas, as a lawgiver, into the Eleusinian mysteries. This 
theory Gibbon completely exploded in his Critical Observa- 
tions (1770) ; no very difficult task, indeed, but achieved in 
a style, and with a profusion of learning, which showed that 
its author was capable of far greater things. Warburton 
never replied, and few will believe that he would not, if he 
had not thought silence more discreet. Gibbon, however, 



264 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

regrets that the style of his pamphlet was too acrimonious ; 
and this regret, considering his antagonist's slight claims to 
forbearance, is creditable to him. " I cannot forgive myself 
the contemptuous treatment of a man who, with all his 
faults, was entitled to my esteem." 1 

At length, after fifteen years from the date of his maiden 
Essai, and five from his father's death — an event which 
left him the free use of his time — appeared the jirst vol- 
ume of the history which has immortalized his name. His 
preparations for this great work were vast. The classics, 
" as low as Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and Juvenal," had 
been long familiar. He now " plunged into the ocean of the 
Augustan history," and " with pen almost always in hand," 
pored over all the remains, Greek and Latin, between Tra- 
jan and the last of the western CaBsars. "The subsidiary 
rays of medals and inscriptions, of geography and chronol- 
ogy, were thrown on their proper objects ; and I applied the 
collections of Tillemont, whose inimitable accuracy almost 
assumes the character of genius, to fix and arrange within 
my reach the loose and scattered atoms of historical informa- 
tion." 2 The Theodosian Code, with Godefroy's Commen- 
tary ; the Christian Apologists, with the testimonies of 
Lardner ; The Annals and Antiquities of Muratori ; col- 
lated with "the parallel or transverse lines" of Sigonius 
and Maffei, Pagi and Baronius, were all critically studied. 
Such was a portion of the formidable apparatus employed 
by this great historical genius. His maxim as a student 
had always been multum legere poiius quant multa. The 
reader will probably think, even from this imperfect enu- 
meration of his studies, that he read both multum and 
multa : but the general accuracy of his investigations was 
commensurate with their variety. It appears from his own 
confession that he long brooded over the chaos of materials 

i Memoir*, p. 139. -lb. p. 140. 



EDWARD GIBBON. 265 

before light dawned upon it. At the commencement, he 
says, " all was dark and doubtful ; " the limits, divisions, 
even the title of his work were undetermined ; the first 
chapter was composed three times, and the second and third 
twice, before he was satisfied with his efforts. But this pro- 
longed meditation on his design and its execution was well 
repaid by the result ; so methodical did his ideas become, 
and so readily did his materials shape themselves, that (with 
the above exceptions) the original MS. of the entire six 
quartos w T ere sent uncopied to the printer. He also says 
that not a sheet had been seen by any other eyes than those 
of author and printer. This last statement must be taken 
with a small deduction ; or rather we must suppose that a 
few chapters had been submitted, if not to the " eyes," to 
the " ears " of others ; for he elsewhere tells us that he was 
"soon disgusted with the modest practice of reading the 
manuscript to his friends." 

Such, however, were his preliminary difficulties, that he 
confesses he was often " tempted to cast away the labor of 
seven years." He persevered, and in February, 1776, the 
first volume was published. The success was instant, and, 
for a quarto, probably unprecedented. The entire impres- 
sion was exhausted in a few days. The author might 
almost have said, as Lord Byron after the publication of 
Ghilde Harold, that " he awoke one morning and found him- 
self famous." In addition to public applause, he was grati- 
fied by the more select praises of Robertson and Hume, and 
declares that the complimentary letter of the last " overpaid 
the labors of ten years." Hume applauds, as may be sup- 
posed, the " prudent temperament " of the historian in the 
treatment of the delicate subjects of the " celebrated chap- 
ters." Nevertheless, he predicted " clamor ; " and formed a 
much more correct notion of the effects on the public mind 
than Gibbon had done. He admits the nation's reverence 
for Christianity, though he calls it " superstition ; " Gibbon 

23 



266 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

believed, or affected to believe, that England sympathized 
-with the indifferentism of France. 

Two years before the publication of this first volume (1774) 
Gibbon was elected member of parliament for Liskeard. 
His political duties did not suspend his prosecution of his 
history, except on one occasion, and for a little while. In 
the year 1779 he undertook a task on behalf of the minis- 
try, which, if well performed, was, it must be confessed, well 
rewarded. The French government had issued a manifesto 
preparatory to a declaration of war, and Gibbon was solic- 
ited by Chancellor Thurlow, and Lord Weymouth, Secretary 
of State, to answer it. This produced his able Memoire 
Justijicatif, composed in French, and delivered to the courts 
of Europe. He was rewarded with a seat at the Board of 
Trade and Plantations, — little more than a sinecure in 
itself, but with a very substantial salary of nearly £800 per 
annum. His acceptance displeased his political assoe ; 
and he was accused of " deserting a party in which," he 
declares, " he had never enlisted." A note of Fox, how- 
ever, on the margin of a copy of Gibbon's history, records 
a very distinct remembrance of the historian's previous vitu- 
peration of the ministry ; and this could not but make his 
political services look venal. lie is said to have said that 
" there would be no hope for England except by taking otf 
the heads of six of the cabinet, and exposing them as an 
example in parliament." Yet in a fortnight lie accepted 
place. Lord Sheffield says his friend never intended the 
words to be taken literally! No doubt, but it sufficiently 
shows what he thought of the deserts of the ministry he yet 
consented to serve. But who can read the life and works 
of Gibbon and imagine him a martyr, whether for love, 
polities, or religion? 

At the general election in L 780, he lost his .-cat tor Lis- 
keard, but Waa subsequently elected for Lvmington. The 
ministry of Lord North, however, was tottering, and soon 



EDWARD GIBBON. 267 

after fell ; the Board of Trade was abolished, and Gibbon's 
salary vanished with it; — no trifle, for his expenditure had 
been for three years on a scale somewhat disproportionate 
to his private fortune. He did not like to depend on states- 
men's promises, which are proverbially uncertain of fulfil- 
ment ; he as little liked to retrench ; and he was wearied of 
parliament, where he had never given any but silent votes. 
Urged by such considerations, he once more turned his eyes 
to the scene of his early exile, where he might live on his 
decent patrimony in a style which was impossible in Eng- 
land, and pursue unembarrassed his literary studies. He 
therefore resolved to fix himself at Lausanne. 

A word only is necessary on his parliamentary career. 
Neither nature nor acquired habits qualified him to be an 
orator ; his late entrance on public life, his natural timidity, 
his feeble voice, his limited command of idiomatic English, 
and even, as he candidly confesses, his literary fame, were 
all obstacles to success. " After a fleeting, illusive hope, 
prudence condemned me to acquiesce in the humble station 
of a mute. ... I was not armed by nature and education 
with the intrepid energy of mind and voice — ' Vincentem 
strepitus et natum rebus agendis.' Timidity was justified by 
pride, and even the success of my pen discouraged the trial 
of my voice." His repugnance to public life is strongly 
expressed in a letter to his father of a very early date. He 
prays that the money which a seat in parliament would cost 
may be expended in a mode more agreeable to him. Gib- 
bon was eight-and-thirty when he entered parliament ; and 
the obstacles which even at an earlier period he would have 
had to encounter were hardly likely to be vanquished then. 

Nor had he much political sagacity. He was better 
skilled in investigating the past than in divining the future. 
While Burke and Fox, and so many great statesmen, pro- 
claimed the consequence of the collision with America, Gib- 
bon saw nothing but colonies in rebellion, and a paternal 



268 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

government justly incensed. His silent votes were all given 
on that hypothesis. In a similar manner, while he abhorred 
the French revolution, he seemed to have had no apprehen- 
sion, like Chesterfield, Burke, or even Horace Walpole, of its 
approach, or that it had any thing to do with the philosophic 
coteries in which he had taken such delight. 

In 1781, he published two more quartos of his history. 
They excited less controversy, and were therefore less 
talked about. This seems to have extorted from him a half 
murmur about " prejudice and neglect." The fact is, there 
was less room for discussion and complaint ; the volumes, 
however, were read with silent avidity, and deserved it. 
Though less exciting than the first, they were written with a 
deeper judgment, and were more free from the taint of in- 
fidelity. 

Having sold all his property except his library — to him 
equally a necessary and a luxury — Gibbon repaired to 
Lausanne in September, 1783, and took up his abode with 
his early friend Deyverdun, now a resident there. Per- 
fectly free from every engagement but those which his own 
tastes imposed, easy*in his circumstances, commanding just 
as much society, and that as select as he pleased, with the 
noblest scenery spread out at his feet, no situation can be 
imagined more favorable for the prosecution of his literary 
enterprise; — a hermit in his study as long as lie chose, and 
the most delightful recreation always ready for him at the 
threshold. " In London," says he, " I was lost in the crowd ; 
I ranked with the first families in Lausanne, and my style 
of prudent expense enabled me to maintain a fair balance 
of reciprocal civilities. . . . Instead of a small house be- 
tween a street and a stable-yard. I began to occupy a spa- 
cious and convenient mansion, connected on the north side 
with the city, and open on the south to a beautiful and 
boundless horizon. A garden of tour acres had been laid 
out by the taste of M. Deyverdun j from the garden a rich 



EDWARD GIBBON. 269 

scenery of meadows and vineyards descends to the Leman 
Lake, and the prospect far beyond the lake is crowned by 
the stupendous mountains of Savoy." l In this enviable re- 
treat, it is no wonder that a year should have been suffered 
to roll round before he vigorously resumed his great work, — 
and with many men it would never have been resumed in 
such a paradise. We may remark en passant that the 
retreat was often enlivened, or invaded, by friendly tourists 
from England, whose " frequent incursions " into Switzerland 
our recluse seems half to lament as an evil. What would 
he have said fifty years later ? Among others, Mr. Fox 
gave him two " welcome days of free and private ' society " 
in 1788. Differing as they did in politics, Gibbon's testi- 
mony to the genius and character of the great statesman is 
highly honorable to both. " Perhaps no human being," he 
says, " was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint of 
malevolence, vanity, or falsehood." 

When once fairly reseated at his task he proceeded in 
this delightful retreat leisurely, yet rapidly, to its comple- 
tion. The fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes were all in man- 
uscript before he thought of printing. On the 27th of June, 
1787, he was " free," if freedom can be predicated of that 
condition, so profoundly natural, which Gibbon has as natu- 
rally delineated. " I have presumed," says he, " to mark 
the moment of conception ; I shall now commemorate the 
hour of my final deliverance. It was on the day, or rather 
night, of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven 
and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page in a 
summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen, 
I took several turns in a berceau or covered walk of acacias, 
which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and 
the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, 
the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, 

* Memoirs, p. 166, 
23* 



270 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first 
emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, per- 
haps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was 
soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my 
mind by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of 
an old and agreeable companion ; and that whatsoever might 
be the future date of my history, the life of* the historian 
must be short and precarious." * Sad that the Consolations 
of Philosophy should have offered nothing better than this ! 

Taking the manuscript of the last three volumes with him, 
Gibbon, after an absence of four years, once more visited 
London. The arrangements for publishing volumes so 
heralded by their predecessors, were soon effected, and 
the printing proceeded apace ; but after it was completed, 
a little trait of characteristic egotism for a while delayed the 
publication. The great event was to synchronize with 
the author's fifty-first birthday, and the two great events 
were celebrated by Mr. Cadell, the publisher, by a third 
great event, — no less than a literary dinner in the author's 
honor; — where, says Gibbon, "I seemed to blush while 
they read an elegant compliment from Mr. Hayley." As- 
suredly it ought to have been no seeming blush with which 
the historian listened to the fulsome hyperboles of the verses 
w r ith which this mediocre Pindar regaled him ; and if he 
did not blush for himself, he ought to have done so for 
the Muse. 

The last volumes of the work were eagerly read, but much 
criticized ; and while the same religious objections were 
taken, and justly, the author was found more fault with for 
the indecency of his notes. Gibbon professes that lie never 
could understand this charge ; and it is very likely (though 
very lamentable) that he spoke the simple truth. In his 
defence he says he had wrapped up the offensive matter in 

1 Memoirs, p. 170. 



EDWARD GIBBON. 271 

the learned languages ; but then, to how many thousands of 
those who read his book were those languages familiar! 
The question is as to the necessity of such citations and com- 
ments as those in which he has indulged, and few will con- 
tend for it, in the majority of cases, to any legitimate pur- 
pose of history. He also says that he had been equally free, 
though less censured, in the earlier volumes. This would 
be nothing to the purpose even if true ; but it is hardly 
true ; for it would be easy to point out in the later volumes 
more than one instance in which Gibbon has gone completely 
out of his way to introduce impurities which none but a 
mind too accustomed to revolve such ideas would wish to 
suggest to the minds of others ; and one instance, at least, in 
which he has chosen to improvise a ludicrous varia lectio of 
a passage for the very purpose of conveying a most gross 
obscenity. As a writer in the Quarterly Review has very 
justly remarked, " the critical scrupulosity with which he 
investigates the most nauseous details, sifting them with the 
pertinacity and relish of a duck filtering the filthiest mud 
for its meal," " his sly innuendoes, his luxurious amplifica- 
tions," disclose a gross and prurient mind. Many other men 
equally skeptical, would have shrunk from this kind of pollu- 
tion ; he plunges into the filth with all the gout and relish 
of a congenial sensuality. 

He returned to Switzerland in July, 1788 ; but the death 
of his friend Deyverdun, and the ennui resulting from the 
loss of his great occupation, which had been as a daily com- 
panion for so many years, had divested his retreat of its 
chief charms ; while the premonitory mutterings of the 
great thunderstorm of the French Revolution, which rever- 
berated in hollow echoes even through the quiet valleys of 
Switzerland, further troubled his repose. At length public 
events, seconded by motives of friendship, drove the historian 
to his island home. He arrived in England in 1793. He 
appears to have amused himself during the latter part of 



272 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

his stay at Lausanne with his Memoirs, which, with his cor- 
respondence and miscellaneous pieces, it was reserved for 
his friend Lord Sheffield to give to the public. 

His life was now drawing to a close. He had fondly an- 
ticipated, from the M laws of probability so true in general," 
but, alas ! " so fallacious in particular," fifteen years of 
life. They proved in his case to be " fallacious in particu- 
lar," for he survived scarcely a fourth of the hoped for 
period. He died January 16, 1794, about nine months 
after his return to England. Singularly enough, he had 
been for years afflicted by the disease which at last 
proved fatal, but had been insensible to its importance, and 
had declined, from false delicacy, to seek medical aid. It 
was an element of the " probabilities," which he had not 
calculated. 

Just before his death he was in full possession of his 
senses, and is said to have died with much composure ; but 
he was evidently unconscious of the stealthy step of the De- 
stroyer till the curtain was suddenly drawn, and the blow 
struck. 

The character of Gibbon presents much that is personally 
and socially estimable. Of a frigid temperament, he had 
not in his composition one particle of the qualities which 
constitute moral greatness in any one of its many forms ; 
but it would be unjust to deny that he was amiable and 
good-tempered, and capable of feeling and inspiring a firm, 
though not very enthusiastic friendship. It must be added 
that his friendships were such as did not involve any severe 
strain upon patience, self-denial, generosity, or on his 
characteristic equanimity. That equanimity, it must be al- 
lowed, was very little tried in any why ; he practised his 
philosophy cheaply. Born to competency, and at length 
possessed of fortune — always fully sensible of the advan- 
tages which fortune brings in her train — provided with 
pleasures and occupations ho intensely loved — successful in 



EDWARD GIBBON. 273 

the great object of his literary ambition, which was his only- 
strong passion, and the gratification of which, as his Memoirs 
show, afforded him intense delight — he seems, if we but 
suppose this world to be all, to have whiled away his time 
here as pleasantly as any wise epicurean could, and to have 
computed the sum of his enjoyments a*t the close with a suf- 
ficiently complacent, but not erroneous arithmetic. 1 " M. 
d'Alembert relates," says he, " that as he was walking in 
the gardens of Sans Souci with the king of Prussia, Fred- 
erick said to him, ' Do you see that old woman, a poor 
weeder, asleep on that sunny bank ? She is probably a 
more happy being than either of us.' The king and the 
philosopher may speak for themselves ; for my part I do 
not envy the old woman." 2 

But with good-nature and social amenity the praise of his 
personal character almost ends. No traits, so far as we can 
find, of self-denial, generosity, magnanimity, nobility of mind, 
mark his history. M. Vaillant even charges him with " in- 
sensibility to all lofty and generous sentiments" This is 
too strong ; at least if the expression of " lofty " sentiments 
(a cheap way, it must be admitted, of manifesting the more 
arduous virtues), may be taken as a key to character where 
we cannot appeal to the better test of action. Of such sen- 
timents of sympathy with magnanimous virtue, there is no 
lack in his Decline and Fall, — if we except two subjects. 
" His reflections," says Porson, " are just and profound ; he 
pleads eloquently for the rights of mankind and the duty of 
toleration, nor does his humanity ever slumber — unless 
when women are ravished, and Christians persecuted." 
The exceptions, it must be confessed, cut deep, and remind 
us a little of the indignant virtue of the Irish woman, who 
challenged her accusers to say, barring theft, lust, and 
drunkenness, what they could have to allege against her. 

1 Memoirs, pp. 182-184. 2 lb., p. 183. 



274 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

Vanity he had in abundance, as appears in his Memoirs ; 
indeed, without it would any man ever write his autobiogra- 
phy ? Yet it is accompanied in Gibbon with much candor. 
Less indulgence can be given to the contemptuous arrogance 
with which he treats opponents. 

His conversation, though, as might be expected, full of 
information, seems to have been, if not tinged with pedant- 
ry, yet too formal. He talked much as he wrote, and this 
prevented his attaining the ease and grace of the best col- 
loquial style. " His conversation," says M. Suard, " never 
carried one away. Its fault was an artificiality which never 
permitted him to say any thing unless well," — that is, well 
in his estimate ; and so, in books, and notes, and conversa- 
tion his diction was apt to be recherche, and his sentences a 
mosaic. 

Gibbon's genius was singularly adapted to the task he 
undertook. He ironically observes, in his Memoirs, that 
since " philosophy has exploded all innate ideas and natural 
propensities," fortuitous causes in early life must be alleged 
to account for the invincible bent of his mind to history. 
But he distinctly intimates his convictions to the con- 
trary in another part of his Memoirs : " After his oracle 
Dr. Johnson, my friend Sir Joshua Reynolds denies all 
original genius, any natural propensity of the mind to one 
art or science rather than another. "Without engaging in a 
metaphysical or, rather, verbal dispute, 1 know by experi- 
ence that from my early youth I aspired to the character of 
an historian." 1 No just philosophy is likely to explode 
'•innate" aptitudes of fundamental peculiarities of mind, 
whether generic or individual; and to these, at least M 

strongly as to education or accident, must we attribute each 

special bias of gen 1 US. Not that these last have little to do 

with the character of intellect, which is finally the resnll of 

1 M.iiwirs, ]). l(»t".. 



EDWARD GIBBON. 275 

two variables — certain original tendencies of mind, and the 
discipline to which the mind has been subjected. It is a 
departure perhaps from ordinary language to speak of some 
one distinct endowment of mind, or congeries of endow- 
ments, and call it an historic genius, in the same way we 
speak of a philosophical or poetical' genius ; but if the 
phrase be ever allowable, it is assuredly so in the case of 
Gibbon. It may be more proper to say, however, that he 
had in large measure all those separate endowments, which, 
in conjunction, best fit a man for this department of compo- 
sition ; some of them hardly compatible at all, and scarcely 
ever seen united. In him all were possessed in a harmony 
and perfection seldom equalled, perhaps never surpassed ; a 
most retentive memory, the most active powers of acqui- 
sition, indomitable industry, a mind capable equally of 
ascending to the most comprehensive, and of descending to 
the most minute surveys ) of appreciating the beautiful and 
sublime in classic literature, and yet of delighting in the 
verbal criticism, tedious collations, and dry antiquarian re- 
search by which the text is established or illustrated ; of 
celebrating the more imposing events of history with con- 
genial pomp of description, and of investigating with the 
dullest plodder's patience and perseverance the origin of 
nations, the emigrations of obscure tribes, and the repulsive 
yet instructive problems which ethnology presents. Ac- 
cordingly, the widest deductions of historic philosophy alter- 
nate in his pages with attempts to fix the true reading of an 
obscure passage or a minute point of chronology or geogra- 
phy. It may even be said that in these last investigations 
he took almost as much delight as in depicting the grander 
scenes of history, and surrendered himself as absolutely for 
the time to the migrations of the Goths and Scythians as to 
the campaigns of Belisarms or the conquests of the Sara- 
cens. It must be added that never has any historian 
evinced greater logical sagacity in making comparatively 



276 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

obscure details yield important inferences, or held with a 
firmer hand the balance in the case of conflicting probabili- 
ties ; none who has exhibited sounder judgment or self- 
control (always excepting Christianity) in cases where it is 
so easy for learned enthusiasm to run into fanciful hypoth- 
eses. To these qualities must be added a singular skill in 
marshalling for effect the diversified and multifarious mat- 
ters of his history, and often much richness of imagination 
and great graphic art in investing their more picturesque 
features with the brilliant tints and colors, the due light and 
shade which belong to historic painting. 

Of the many high qualities which characterize his history 
perhaps none is more marked than the manner in which he 
he has managed to manoeuvre, so to speak, the vast array 
of facts which crowd its pages. It is the amplest historic 
canvas ever spread, the largest historic painting ever exe- 
cuted by a single hand. The history of Rome is, for the 
many centuries which Gibbon treats, the history of the 
world ; and it is astonishing that he should have been able 
to work with so much ease such vast and incongruous ma- 
terials with so much unity of design ; that he should have 
been able (so to speak) to exhibit the many-colored nations 
of all varieties of costume, habits, languages, and religions 
in one tolerably consistent tableau. The history is a sort 
of moving panorama of the nations ; and as tribe after 
tribe, nation after nation, Celt, Goth, Saracen, and Sarma- 
tian appear on the scene from the obscurity of their origi- 
nal seats, they blend with grace in the picturesque narrative. 
His history is like the Indus or the Mississippi, swelling 
and still swelling by a thousand tributary floods, which aug- 
ment its volume, and tinge its waters, but without destroying 
the identity or the pervading character of the stream. 

The style of Gibbon has great merits, mixed with some 
not trivial defects. The u luminous Gibbon," was a phrase 
of Sheridan in his speech on Hastings's trial, with which 



EDWARD GIBBON. 277 

Gibbon was much delighted : but which the malicious wit 
afterwards playfully denied, and said he must have meant 
the " voluminous Gibbon." Yet the epithet may well stand. 
The diction is precise, energetic, massive; splendid where 
the pictorial demands of the narrative require it, as that of 
Livy ; and sometimes, where profound reflections are to be 
concisely expressed, as sententious and graphic as that of 
Tacitus. Less can be said for the sources of his diction ; it 
is not sufficiently idiomatic English, and bears everywhere 
the traces of his early addictedness to French. The Galli- 
cisms are in many places amusingly perverse. Thus, for 
example, his constant use of " prevents " in the old sense of 
u anticipate " sometimes leads to ludicrous apparent contra- 
diction, as when he tells us that " The prefect had signalized 
his fidelity to Maximin by the alacrity with which he had 
obeyed and even prevented the cruel mandates of the ty- 
rant ; " or, again, that " the fortunate soil assisted and even 
prevented the hand of cultivation." 

The structure of his style is open to still greater objec- 
tions than his diction. Harmonious as it often is, it is too 
frequently set and formal ; deficient in flexibility. It is apt 
to pall on the ear by the too frequent recurrence of the same 
cadence at equal intervals, and the too unsparing use of an- 
tithesis. It is not veined marble, but an exquisite tessela- 
tion ; not the fluent naturally winding stream, but a stately 
aqueduct, faced with stone, adorned with wooded embank- 
ments, or flowing over noble arches, but an aqueduct still. 
It is a just criticism of Sir James Mackintosh, that probably 
no writer ever derived less benefit from his professed mod- 
els. Pascal, Voltaire, Hume, were his delight, and he ac- 
knowledges (as so unsuccessful a pupil well might) that he 
often closed the pages of the last with a feeling of de- 
spair. Addison and Swift he read for the very purpose of 
improving his acquaintance with idiomatic English, yet, as 
the above critic remarks, " with so little success, that in the 
24 



278 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

very act of characterizing these writers, he has deviated not 
a little from that beautiful simplicity which is their peculiar 
distinction." 

The irony of Gibbon, on which he evidently plumed him- 
self, is in him no pleasant feature, not merely because in 
history it can seldom be in place if much indulged, but be- 
cause it is especially distasteful to the great majority of his 
readers when applied to those deeply serious themes on 
which he usually exercises it. He flattered himself, as 
already seen, that Pascal's Provincial Letters had taught 
him to use this weapon gracefully ; as little, it may be re- 
torted, as Addison and Swift had taught him the use of idio- 
matic English. The difference between an innocent smile 
and a sardonic grin is scarcely greater than that between 
the irony of Pascal and the irony of Gibbon ; the one speaks 
Avith a sweet riant air, as with the consciousness that what is 
ridiculed is ridiculous ; the other with a cautious, stealthy, Guy 
Faux look, as if conscious of a sinister purpose. Gibbon's 
irony almost always wears a sneer, and seldom provokes the 
smile of the reader, even where the subject does not repel it. 
Not only so, it is so elaborate as to lose much of its grace even 
where innocent ; in other cases it is often so masked as to 
leave the reader (Pascal is never thus changeable) in doubt 
whether the author meant what he seemed to mean, or 
whether he is not meditating, by the very form of expres- 
sion, a pusillanimous escape from the inferences that may 
be legitimately founded on it. 

We have expressed ungrudging admiration of the great 
merits of this astonishing work. It has. nevertheless, one 
pervading blemish, of which we shall speak with similar im- 
partiality. That blemish is, of course, the treatment of Chris- 
tianity. 

If the Christian public had given itself time t<> reflect, it 
would haV« been seen that Gibbon's attack really afforded 
little cause for alarm. The purpose of the assassin-like 



EDWARD GIBBON. 279 

stroke from behind the curtain of his irony is plain enough ; 
but is really a brutum fulmen. Gibbon himself has pro- 
vided for his own defeat by his very mode of conducting the 
assault. If he meant, as he seemed to insinuate rather than 
affirm (or, to speak more accurately, insinuated while in 
words he expressly affirmed the contrary), that his " five 
secondary causes " gave a probable natural solution of the 
origin and early triumphs of Christianity, — then the whole 
thing was a ludicrous instance of varegov rtooteoov, or, as our 
proverb has it, of " the cart before the horse." The story 
begins all too late ; the " causes " require as much to be ac- 
counted for as the " effects ; " or rather, they are among the 
very effects to be accounted for. According to this mode 
of explaining the origin of Christianity, causes are assigned 
which implied not only its existence, but its activity ; in 
other words, the hypothesis assigns Christianity itself as a 
cause of itself, and its success as a ground of its success. 
Thus, for example, if he is to be supposed (as he evidently 
wishes the reader to infer) to be accounting for the purely 
human origin and triumphs of Christianity, — the most po- 
tent secondary causes he assigns are the zeal, morality, vir- 
tue, unity, 1 and so forth, of the Christian church ; mean- 
while, the very thing that demands explanation is just the 

1 As to his third secondary cause, " miracles," the same may be said 
as of his ironically conceded primary cause. He either meant that 
miracles had been performed, or not ; if he did, he of course concedes 
the main point ; if he did not, then he is giving a nothing (by a new 
name) to account for the success of Christianity. If it be said that 
what he meant was the pretension to miracles, though miracles there 
were none, it is very likely ; but then it is easy to reply that though 
such pretensions have been often of service when a religion has already 
become accredited, there is no example (unless he choose to beg the ques- 
tion by assuming it of the Jewish and Christian religions) of a religion 
successfully founding itself on such hazardous assumptions, while there 
are many examples of failure in such attempts ; that is, Gibbon's 
cause, as usual, comes too late. 



280 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

sudden apparition in the world of this singular phenomenon, 
the Christian church, with this bright retinue of virtues ; 
how it was that a system from which the Jews have re- 
coiled more than any other nation for the last eighteen hun- 
dred years, should have sprung up in their bosom, in spite 
of all their national antipathies ; how it was that a system 
which was scarcely less odious from its origin, its character, 
its doctrines (in a word, every thing), to all other nations, 
should nevertheless have found its proselytes so rapidly in 
every part of the Roman empire ; and in a few centuries, 
not only gained a sphere for the exercise of that marvellous 
" virtue " and " zeal " which it indeed might cause, but 
which could hardly cause it, but dethroned all the deities of 
Olympus, and became the established religion of the empire ! 
That was the problem ; and Gibbon takes it up long after 
Christianity had made good its footing, and assigns, if he 
means what he seems to mean, causes for its origin and suc- 
cess, which already presuppose both origin and success ! It 
is as though a man were seeking the source of the Nile, and 
ascending no higher than the cataracts, avows that he iinds 
its fountain there. Such is the value of Gibbon's hypothesis, 
supposing he intended his secondary causes to account for 
the origin and triumphs of Christianity ; but, as before said, 
he made a provision for his retreat, by nominally granting 
the " truth of the doctrine and the providence of God "' to be 
the great cause of the success of Christianity. Seriously, 
one would imagine, (if we did not know his manner,) thai he 
meant all this; for in his Vindication^ in reply to Davis, 
where he takes occasion briefly to mention Watson's Letters, 
and to excuse himself from reply, he appeals to this very 
concession as a reason for silence! lie Bays, — -The re- 
marks of Dr. Watson consist more properly of general argu- 
mentation than of particular criticism, lie fairly owns that 
1 have expressly allowed the full and irresistible weight of 
the first great cause of the success of Christianity ; and he 



EDWARD GIBBON. 281 

is too candid to deny that the five secondary causes, which 
I had attempted to explain, operated with some degree of 
active energy towards the accomplishment of that great 
event. The only question which remains between us re- 
lates to the degree of the weight and effect of those secondary 
causes ; and as I am persuaded that our philosophy is not of 
the dogmatic kind, we should soon acknowledge that this 
precise degree cannot be ascertained by reasoning, nor per- 
haps be expressed by words." 1 This language, on the sup- 
position that Gibbon was still really ironizing, greatly aggra- 
vates the disingenuousness of the " celebrated chapters." 
But either he meant what he said, or he did not ; if he did, 
it of course formally surrenders the argument which infidel- 
ity has founded on the supposed sufficiency of his " secon- 
dary " causes ; if* he did not mean it, he of course evades the 
very question which his antagonist (and every other discreet 
antagonist) would contest with him, by ironically affecting 
argument. 

It may be further remarked, not only that the Christian 
feels that the " secondary causes " of Gibbon do not touch 
the principal problem, — but that infidelity has confessed, in 
a most significant way, a similar mistrust, by laboriously con- 
structing other, and often reciprocally destructive hypotheses, 
to account for the intractable phenomena. That of Strauss 
is one, which, unlike that of Gibbon, professes to track the 
origin of Christianity to its cradle ; but faithfully represents 
that of Gibbon and many more, in one respect, that it is 
ephemeral. It is even now fast losing its transient prestige. 
These shining exhalations from the bog of skepticism glim- 
mer, flicker, and vanish. Fortuitous myth, deliberate fiction, 
deep fraud practising on simplicity, deep fanaticism practis- 
ing on itself, — have all under various modifications been 
resorted to, as the contradictory basis of infidel theories, and 

1 Miscellaneous Works, Vol. iii. p. 362. The italics are the author's own. 
24* 



282 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

have been successively abandoned. The problem of the 
origin of such a system as Christianity under such circum- 
stances, and with such results, within a given century, still 
presents the ancient difficulty. Meanwhile it may now be 
safely asserted, that the chief hypotheses have been exhaust- 
ed ; and we have reason to infer therefore, that the vast ma- 
jority who examine Christianity will be as they have hith- 
erto been, of Butler's opinion, that nothing but the truth of 
the gospel will harmonize the facts. 

But still further; it is a special weakness in Gibbon's 
theory that so far from his " secondary causes" being suffi- 
cient to account for the origin, they do not even account for 
the progress of the gospel ; they are, when closely investi- 
gated, quite as often opposed to that progress ; sometimes 
must have been far greater hindrances than helps. Nothing 
can be more infelicitous than some of his suppositions. For 
example, he imagines that the " intolerant zeal " of Chris- 
tianity — which expressed the most open and derisive con- 
tempt of all the gods, consecrated by the classic mythologies 
— was a mysterious advantage to it! That the austere vir- 
tue with which, be it recollected, it not only recoiled from 
the too welcome laxity of a jovial heathenism, but enlarged 
the circle of moral duties by adding the demands of the 
most diffusive and refined spiritual purity — would somehow 
attract votaries! That its visions of immortality — of a 
heaven so unalluring — of a hell so terrible — would be of 
magnetic force ! surely these are problematic auxiliaries. 
Similarly, some of the facts he assumes are purely imaginary ; 
he attributes the zeal of proselytism manifested by the 
Christians to a Jewish origin, forgetting that the zeal of the 
Jews was just of the opposite kind; that Judaism was as ex- 
elusive as Christianity is catholic. There may he, no doubt, 
zeal for freedom and zeal for slavery; but because eaeh is 
zeal, it would be odd to derive one from the other. Another 
cause to which he attributes much, was, alas! too often non- 



EDWARD GIBBON. 283 

existent, and its effects were at least neutralized by opposite 
causes. It is the unity of the early church ; its close com- 
pacted organization ! Surely a singular topic of compliment, 
and even at a very early period a doubtful source of strength. 
The divisions, jealousies, and quarrels of Christians, were 
from the very first their weakness and their shame ; and 
must have been at least as influential to retard, as ever their 
union was to advance, the progress of the gospel. 

In conclusion, Christians may take some encouragement 
from Gibbon's failure. If ever man could hope to be the 
historic champion of infidelity with success, it was he. His 
work has such prodigious merits in nearly every thing but 
its treatment of Christianity, as to have procured it almost 
universal perusal ; it has now been published for the greater 
part of a century ; and what, relatively to Christianity, have 
been its effects ? Quite inappreciable. His management of 
this high argument is generally considered as the great blot 
of the work ; as a sufficient, or even plausible account of 
the origin and early triumphs of Christianity, it is for the 
most part abandoned by infidels themselves. 

The New Testament, somehow, still manages to impress 
the bulk of mankind who examine it, with an indelible con- 
viction that it is the fruit of neither imposture, fiction, nor 
fanaticism, and that the facts connected with the propagation 
of the religion it embodies are historic verities. Since men 
have persisted in this belief, in spite of the efforts of such 
men as Bolingbroke, Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbon, to disa- 
buse them, it is not probable that the enterprise in which 
such champions have failed will be successfully achieved by 
other hands. Hence it may be inferred that if Christianity 
be false, it will, nevertheless, not be exploded. 

The manner in which Gibbon prosecutes his object affords, 
no doubt, great facilities for exciting prejudices against 
Christianity, and ample scope for his cherished sneer. 
Christianity does not enter on the scene till it had degener- 



284 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

ated in some degree from its primitive purity, and had con- 
tracted many pollutions. The foibles and follies of its ad- 
herents, of course afford a very easy triumph to the satirist. 

The Christian religion, once originated, and having 
achieved an initial success, was left to struggle with all the 
corrupting influences of the world, and, as might be expected, 
did not come off uninjured. Brought into contagious con- 
tact with false philosophies and degrading superstitions, and 
gathering converts from those who were but partially re- 
claimed from either, no wonder that its purity was blemished. 
But all this which is favorable to Gibbon's satire, is any 
thing but favorable to his argument : for the characteristics 
of Christianity to which, one moment, he would fain assign 
such wonderful efficacy, are anon exhibited in a very differ- 
ent light; are alternately, as the exigencies of his argument 
or the gratification of his malignity may dictate, the objects 
of respect or contempt. Thus the zeal and the purity of 
manners which are now so potent a cause of success, are 
now transformed, the one into bigotry and fanaticism, the 
other into austerity and grimace. But rclis et ranis ; if 
Christianity may but be discredited, the historian seems but 
little troubled by his own inconsistencies. Thus, to give 
other instances of this blind animosity: sometimes the Chris- 
tiana are, nearly all, poverty-stricken wretches, the very 
dregs of society ; presently they have plenty of riches 
among them, and the mere prodigality of their benevolence 
is no inconsiderable bait for proselvtism : at one time the 
early Christians, for a certain purpose, are too obscure to at- 
tract the attention of the Roman great ; then, for another 
purpose, it is suddenly remarkable4\u\t illustrious men like 
Tacitus and Seneca could have been so insensible to its rxi.-t- 
encc, or have regarded it with such apathy ! 

The historian, in short, has greatly diminished the perni- 
cious effect of his attack, by the animus \w everywhere be- 
trays. It is that of inveterate prejudice, of resolute hostility. 



EDWARD GIBBON. 285 

On this one topic he is never moved to generous or noble 
emotions. The excellence of the Christian ethics, indeed, is 
coldly conceded ; but even Gibbon could hardly deny that. 

The sixteenth chapter is in some respects worse than the 
fifteenth ; for in his anxiety to depreciate the numbers and 
heroism of the Christian martyrs, he forgets what is due to 
his professed maxims of toleration, and becomes, if not the 
apologist, the palliator of the most odious persecution. But 
his conduct here has been rebuked by one whose eminently 
calm and judicial spirit, and exemption from all suspicion of 
religious fanaticism, render his testimony particularly im- 
pressive. " The sixteenth chapter," says Sir James Mackin- 
tosh, " I cannot help considering as a very ingenious and 
specious, but very disgraceful extenuation of the cruelties 
perpetrated by the Roman magistrates against the Christians. 
It is written in the most contemptibly factious spirit of prej- 
udice against the sufferers Dr. Robertson has 

been the subject of much blame for his zeal or supposed 
lenity toward the Spanish murderers and tyrants in America. 
That the sixteenth chapter of Mr. Gibbon did not excite 
the same or greater disapprobation, is a proof of the unphi- 
losophical and indeed fanatical animosity against Christianity 
which was so prevalent during the latter part of the seven- 
teenth century." 1 It is also well observed by M. Guizot, 
that there is scarcely any thing in his history that does not 
move Gibbon more than Christianity and its fortunes. The 
achievements of a vigorous barbarism — the sanguinary 
conquests, even the odious cruelties of a Bajazet or a Tam- 
erlane — are described with more animation than the moral 
conquests of Christianity. One would have imagined that 
at least the prodigious influence of Christianity, true or false, 
on the world's history and civilization, would have been a 
tempting theme for the philosophical historian's speculation. 

1 Mackintosh's Life, Vol. I. p. 245. 



286 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

Yet, as the above writer has observed, it is a topic almost 
unappreciated by him. A single sentence from M. Guizot's 
article in the Biographie Universelle well expresses the 
above traits. " Apres s'etre efforce de rebaisser le courage 
hero'ique des martyrs Chretiens, il prend plaisir a celebrer 
le feroces exploits de Tamerlan et des Tartares : la grandeur 
materielle, si on peut le dire, le frappe beaucoup plus que 
la grandeur morale; et les elans d'une vertu sublime ne 
penetrant point j'usqu' a son ame, tandis que les ecarts d'une 
force barbare seduissent son imagination et egarent son 
j 'ugement. 

It is difficult, as several critics have remarked, to account 
for Gibbon's extreme injustice to Christianity. Some have 
fancied, and himself in his later days would fain counte- 
nance the fancy, that it was partly due to his " conservative 
politics;" because he regarded Christianity as he would a 
" modern innovation," and yearned, with desperate fidelity 
to antiquity, over the old heathenism it supplanted ; because 
he felt much as he did at seeing the throne of France me- 
naced by revolutionary fury ! A remarkable passage to 
this effect occurs in one of his latest letters to Lord Shef- 
field, dated 1790. He says, " Burke's book is a most ad- 
mirable medicine against the French disease, which has 
made too much progress even in this happy country. I 
admire his eloquence, I approve his politics, I adore his 
chivalry, and I can forgive even his superstition. The prim- 
itive church, which I have treated with some freedom, was 
itself at that time an innovation, and 1 was attached to the 
old Pagan establishment." 1 To most this has appeared an 
after-tftoiujht, ami justly. For was ever an argument more 
suicidal ! When he wrote, Christianity, right or wrong, was 
in possession ; and to attempt to destroy it was to do that 
very work of destruction which he professed to deprecate ; 

1 Gibbon's Works, Vol. I. i>. 214. 



EDWARD GIBBON. 287 

yet he had the effrontery to say in his Memoir, on the 
breaking out of the French Revolution, — "I have some- 
times thought of writing a dialogue of the dead, in which 
Lucian, Erasmus, and Voltaire, should mutually acknowl- 
edge the danger of exposing an old superstition to the con- 
tempt of a blind and fanatic multitude." 1 Assuredly he 
should have made himself a fourth interlocutor in the dia- 
logue, and confessed that he was the greatest culprit, in this 
kind, of his whole generation. Christianity, which, even if 
according to him a " superstition," could plead the hoary 
prescription of nearly two thousand years, he did his best to 
undermine, because so many centuries ago it had dethroned 
poor Jupiter ! On the same principles, had he lived in the 
age of Augustus, he ought to have exemplified his zeal 
against innovation by being jealous of the upstart of Olym- 
pus, pleaded for the restoration of Saturn, or even gone 
back to the more " primitive tradition " of " Chaos and Old 
Night!" 

It would have been well if the contemporaries of Gibbon 
had adopted that moderate estimate of his attack on Chris- 
tianity which experience has now justified us in forming. 
As it was, the public took fright, and numberless hasty re- 
plies were published, — some of them insolent and abusive, 
most of them very inadequate in point of learning and logic, 
and none of them, if we except those of Watson and Lord 
Hailes, of much value. That of Watson alone touched the 
real points of the controversy, and showed that Gibbon's 
sophistry left the great problem as it was. It is a pity that 
Gibbon, instead of replying, evaded it by that disingenuous 
feint of agreement on the main point at issue, to which ref- 
erence has been already made. 

The only adversary whom he honored with distinct ref- 
utation was Davis, whose unworthy attempt to depreciate 

i Gibbon's Works, Vol. I. p. 181. 



288 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

the great historian's learning, and captious, cavilling, ac- 
rimonious charges of petty inaccuracies and discreditable 
falsification, gave Gibbon an easy triumph. It was, as he 
said, a " sufficient humiliation," to vanquish such an adver- 
sary. At the same time it must be confessed, that he se- 
lected his adversary discreetly. 

The charges of inaccuracy against Gibbon in the citation 
of his authorities have often been repeated, but they are not, 
except to a very limited extent, substantiated in the estimate 
of the most recent and competent of his editors. In his 
treatment of Christianity, his inveterate and resolute prej- 
udices may account for his partial evidence and perverted 
logic without accusing him, as Davis did, of ignorance, 
which cannot be suspected, or of deliberate suppressio veri, 
which one would not suspect. 

It is impossible to enumerate here the various editions of 
Gibbon's works, or to enter into the voluminous literature 
they have evoked. It may be well to mention, however, 
the beautiful edition of the Decline and Fall recently put 
forth in eight volumes octavo under the editorship of Dr. W. 
Smith, and which embodies the notes of Professor Milman 
and M. Guizot. 

He who would obtain a full insight into the character and 
genius of Gibbon, would do well to consult not only the 
Memoir, but the Letters and Journals; his life was em- 
phatically that of a student and scholar, and these remains 
as vividly illustrate it, as the Memoir itself. 



GASSENDI 



Pierre Gassend Gassendi, one of the most distin- 
guished philosophers of the seventeenth century, was born in 
the last decade of the sixteenth (2'2d January, 1592), at the 
village of Chantersier, near Digne in Provence. His 
family was humble, but his parents were virtuous ; and to 
their instructions and influence Gassendi seems to have 
owed a more than usual debt of gratitude. His childhood 
exhibited the most astonishing, not to say incredible, pre- 
cocity ; and, if the feats told of him are true, shows (as M. 
De Gerando observes in his able sketch of this philosopher 
in the Biographie Universelle) that the feeling which is apt to 
regard unusual precocity as a treacherous omen is not always 
to be trusted. At the age of four, Sorbiere tells us, he 
sometimes played among his youthful companions the part 
of a censor, and imitated the manner of a preacher. At 
the same tender age he often crept out at night to watch the 
stars — to the great alarm of his parents. At ten he de- 
claimed in a tiny harangue before the Bishop of Digne 
(Antony of Boulogne), on the occasion of a pastoral visita- 
tion ; which struck that prelate (as it well might) with such 
wonder, that he did not hesitate, in spite of the aforesaid 
general distrust of precocity, to prophesy the boy-orator's 
future eminence. Either that, or an early grave, or speedy 

25 (289) 



290 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

fatuity, would certainly be a very rational deduction from 
symptoms of such premature mental activity. 

Gassendi was then receiving lessons from the cure of the 
village ; but such was his ardor, that when he had learned 
the prescribed tasks, he would pursue his solitary studies by 
the light of the church lamp. At Digne he studied rhetoric, 
and composed certain petites comedies. He then went to 
Aix to study philosophy under Fesaye, a professor who 
strongly shared and expressed the rising discontent with the 
reigning scholastic philosophy. At sixteen our still beard- 
less philosopher was elected to the chair of rhetoric at 
Digne ; but, being destined for the church, speedily returned 
to Aix to study theology, and other branches appropriate to 
the ecclesiastical profession. At the early age of twenty- 
one he was simultaneously elected to the two chairs of phi- 
losophy and theology in the university of Aix. He chose 
the latter, and delivered his first course extemporaneously. 
He retained this chair for ten years. Not content with 
merely fulfilling the duties of his chair, he indulged in ample 
excursions into almost every department of* science and 
literature, and made large collections of notes, which were 
afterwards of great service to him as a philosophical critic. 
His favorite pursuits in his leisure hours were astronomy 
and anatomy. He confesses, too, a passing penchant for 
astrology; but it soon disappeared, and he became one of 
the most strenuous opponents of that delusive science. In 
1G23 he was presented to a benefice in the cathedral of 
Digne, and gave up his chair in order to surrender himself 
more completely to study. In the following year he com- 
menced author by the publication of a portion of his J\ 
dtationes paradoxic^ adversus Aristotelem, a work which 
naturally called forth, in equal measure, the censures oi' the 
servile lovers of antiquity, and the admiration oi' the ardent 
minds who longed to inaugurate a new era in science and 
philosophy. He himself, according to M. De Gerando, 



GASSENDI. 291 

seemed half astonished at the report of his own artillery. 
But being now committed as author, he desired, says the 
same writer, " s'eclairer par des observations et des conseils 
et former des relations utiles." With this view he made 
excursions in Provence and Dauphine, visited the capital, 
and took a journey to the Low Countries and Holland — 
everywhere forming friendships with the literati of the age, 
haunting learned establishments and consulting public li- 
braries. With similar views, as a pilgrim of science, he pro- 
jected, in common with other learned men, a journey to 
Italy and Constantinople, but this design he never executed. 
During his stay at Marseilles, in 1636, he made some im- 
portant astronomical observations ; and, by the aid of lunar 
eclipses, ascertained more correctly the limits, in latitude 
and longitude, of the Mediterranean, the length of which 
hydr'ographers, following Ptolemy, had exaggerated in the 
current charts by no less than two hundred leagues. In 
1638, he found an ardent friend and admirer in Louis de 
Valois, afterwards Due d'Angouleme ; and if the philoso- 
pher, who ever preferred studious retirement to public life, 
had been ambitious, he might have availed himself of this 
patron's aid to secure station and riches. In 1 645 there was 
some thought of making him tutor to the young prince, after- 
wards Louis XIV., but it came to nothing. He was ap- 
pointed, however, mathematical lecturer in the Royal Col- 
lege of France by the good offices of the Archbishop of 
Lyons, brother of Cardinal Richelieu. From that ambi- 
tious minister himself he never received any favor ; which, 
says De Gerando, is remarkable, considering the affection 
of the Archbishop and the renown of the philosopher. But, 
too often, politicians regard neither affection nor merit where 
talents cannot be serviceable to them, and Gassendi's modest 
and retiring spirit was little likely to help the ambitious car- 
dinal. Meantime, his fame gradually spread. Amongst his 
ardent admirers appear royal and noble names : — Christina, 



292 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

Queen of Sweden ; Frederick III. of Denmark ; a couple 
of popes ; and several French princes. The Cardinal de 
Retz also highly esteemed and honored him. But he has 
more legitimate claims to remembrance than the suffrages of 
contemporaries illustrious only for rank and station ; and, 
indeed, with the exception of De Retz, he is himself better 
known now than any of the above-mentioned admirers. A 
more emphatic testimony to the deserved esteem in which 
he was held is found in his intimacy with all the great liter- 
ati and philosophers of his day, with most of whom he main- 
tained an active correspondence, which forms by no means 
the least interesting portion of his works. A formidable list 
of these illustrious friends and acquaintances is given in Sor- 
biere's " General Preface " to Gassendi's works. Galileo 
conferred upon him signal proofs of esteem, and Gassendi 
consoled Galileo in his persecutions ; though, like Descartes, 
he prudently declined any chance of sharing them. The 
martyrs of science have been always scarce. 

The lectures of Gassendi at the Royal College were well 
attended. To Astronomy, which had been too much neg- 
lected, he gave due prominence. Public speaking, how- 
ever, was injurious to his lungs, which were always delicate, 
and he was at length compelled to desist. He then repaired 
to Digne for the benefit of his native air, and also spent 
some pleasant time under the hospitable roof of his friend 
and patron Louis de Yalois, Earl of Alais. During this 
interval he was chiefly occupied in composing his biogra- 
phies. He finally returned to Paris, where, after a long 
and gradual decay, he died October 14, 1655. His death is 
said to have been hastened by the mad phlebotomy then in 
vogue. He himself had often condemned the practice ; 
somewhat inconsistently, it will be thought, since he allowed 
himself to be killed by the Sangrados of his day. He is 
said to have reconciled himself to the treatment to which he 
submitted, though he could not approve it, by the thought 



GASSENDI. 293 

that the weakness it induced would probably diminish the 
pangs of dissolution. His last words, as he begged his at- 
tendant to feel the feeble pulsation of his heart, were, " You 
see what man's life is ! " He was buried in the church of 
St. Nicholas des Champs, where he is honored by a mau- 
soleum and bust. 

The countenance of Gassendi is very imposing. The 
broad, massive brow, full eye, and expressive contour of the 
face, bespeak a mind full of intelligence, vivacity, and be- 
nevolence. 1 

The character of Gassendi's intellect is everywhere indi- 
cated by his works ; — it was critical rather than inventive. 
Probably no one was ever better qualified to be a genuine 
historian of philosophy, possessing as he did keen analytical 
skill, in conjunction with profound and accurate erudition. 
His Syntagma Philosophium everywhere displays these char- 
acteristics. It is a vast attempt to exhibit in one encyclo- 
paedic view the entire circle of science as then known ; — 
logics, physics, physiology, ethics, all find a place there. 
Subjects are discussed with a minuteness, copiousness, and 
patience, which remind one of the style in which questions, 
equally subtle and intractable, and not always more profit- 
less, are treated in the Summa Theologice of Thomas Aqui- 
nas. Gassendi's powers of acquisition must have been sin- 
gularly active ; nor was his logical acuteness, or the liveli- 
ness of his imagination, much inferior to the promptness and 
retentiveness of his memory. His learning is never mere 
learning ; like that of many of his erudite contemporaries, 
it ministers to his intellect, but does not oppress it. The 
vivacity of his mind animates and penetrates the mass ; and 

1 The engraving in the folio edition of his works (1728) is in strikr 
ing contrast with the grim effigies of Tycho Brahe and Copernicus in 
the quarto which contains Gassendi's lives of those philosophers. But 
it must be confessed the art of engraving had made prodigious pro- 
gress in the interval, 

25* 



294 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

the acuteness of his reasoning and the exuberance of his 
illustrations relieve of much of their tedium discussions in 
themselves often uninviting enough. 

The intellectual characteristics of Gassendi, as compared 
with those of the far more original and profound Descartes, 
are sharply set off in a long and elaborate parallel in the 
article by De Gerando in the Biographie VniverseUe, and 
it will be well to find space for a translation of a few of its 
more discriminating touches. " There was no less opposi- 
tion," says he, " between the character of their minds than 
between the principles of their systems. The genius of 
Descartes, full of originality, energy, and audacity, aspired 
in all things to create ; the understanding of Gassendi, re- 
served, prudent, calm, and investigating, contented itself 
with a sound judgment of every thing; Descartes, shut 
up in himself, strove to reconstruct universal science by the 
force of meditation alone ; Gassendi, observing nature, 
studying the writings of all ages, strove to coordinate fats, 
and to make an enlightened election among opinions. The 
former, proceeding in the track of the geometers, de- 
duced from a few simple principles a long train of corol- 
laries: the second, imitating the naturalists, collected a 
great number of given facts in order to draw solid deduc- 
tions from their comparison. The former evinced admirable 
ability in the art of forming a system, the latter excelled in 
the criticism of other people's systems. The one, an abso- 
lute dogmatist, loved to speak in the style of a master, per- 
haps because he was conscious of profound conviction, and 
did not patiently bear contradiction ; the other, a skilled 
dialectician, unravelled objections with art, distrusted him- 
self, and easily entertained doubts which presented them- 
selves. The one made great and veritable discoveries, and 
at the same time wandered into rash hypotheses ; the other 
brought together a great number of partial truths, and, 
above all, destroyed a great number of errors." 



GASSENDI. 295 

The qualities of Gassendi's mind are perhaps nowhere 
more distinctly marked than in his commentary on the 
Tenth Booh of Diogenes Laertius, and his tractate on the 
life and philosophy of Epicurus. In his attempt to ascer- 
tain, illustrate, and defend the philosophy of his favorite 
Epicurus, there was ample scope for his exuberant learning, 
his critical acumen, and his eclectic tendencies. It is a pity 
that he should have been so inordinately enamored of this 
Greek philosopher ; for his strong expressions have in- 
vited accusations, and even given color to them, which 
seem wholly unfounded. Whatever his predilections for 
the atomic philosophy, he explicitly repudiates the irre- 
ligious dogmas founded upon it; and acknowledges that a 
supreme intelligence alone created and organized matter, 
alone imparted and conserves its laws and properties. 
" Metaphysics, morals, and physics," says M. De Gerando, 
" are conformed to the opinions of Epicurus ; yet with the 
modifications which the principles of Christianity demand." 
Whether even the eclectic criticism of Gassendi could quite 
harmonize such materials, even by the most judicious selec- 
tions and rejections, may be a question ; but that he sin- 
cerely thought he had advanced nothing contrary to Chris- 
tianity, is evident from the entire tenor of his declaration ; 
and he must be believed unless we are determined on a 
more unpleasant alternative — that of supposing him at least 
as great a hypocrite as philosopher. 1 If the works just 
referred to exhibit as distinctly as any the more marked 
features of Gassendi's intellectual character, it is the Syn- 
tagma Philosophicum, of course, which displays all the en- 

1 After avowing his orthodoxy very explicitly, he says, in the Pro- 
emial Book of his Syntagma, " Et vidori quidem potest Epicurus 
arridere prae ceteris ... at non idcirco aut probo omnia quae illius 
sunt, — etiam Eeligionis non attinentia placita; aut quae probo non 
sic amplector ut indubia certaque habeam . . . " — Opera, torn, i., 
p. 25, Edit. Elorent. 



296 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

dowments of this great philosopher in their amplest form. 
The remarks on the Meditations of Descartes, however, 
(supplied at the request of Father Mersenne,) best present 
many of its phases. They are marked by an acuteness and 
vivacity which he never surpassed. 

As a metaphysician it has been mentioned that, however 
ingenious and learned, he is yet critical rather than creative. 
The same must be said of him as a mathematician and 
physical philosopher. His attainments in the mathematics 
were such as to elicit the praises of Barrow, no incompetent 
judge ; and doubtless his fame might have been yet greater 
had he not, like Barrow himself, Pascal, Descartes, and so 
many other great mathematicians, varied or combined this 
study with so many very different pursuits. It seems, if we 
may judge by the conduct of almost every great mathema- 
tician from the time of those just mentioned to the present 
day, that, delightful as is the discovery and contemplation 
of mathematical truth, it cannot alone fill or content the 
mind. It is hardly possible to name instances of great 
mathematicians who are known only as great mathematicians, 
or who have not profoundly studied some branches either of 
physics or abstract science. Gassendi, according to Sorbiere, 
avowedly valued mathematics chiefly as an indispensable 
instrument of discovery in physical science. 

Ardently attached to the new philosophy of experiment, 
Gassendi was one of the first Frenchmen, if nor the first, 
who fully appreciated Bacon, and in introducing him to 
his countrymen, paid ungrudging homage to his genius. 3 
Though such an admirer, however, of the new school of 
physics, he himself, as in other departments, made but 

1 " Is videlicit meditatns attendensque, quam sit exigaum, quod, 
ox quo tempore homines philosopher] csaperant, eirce reritatem, in- 
timaqne rerum nature notitiam consecati sunt ; ausu r 
novum tcnturo viain est uusus . . . ." — Optra, torn. i. f p. 85, Edit. 
Florent. 



GASSENDI. 297 

moderate contributions to discovery. Here, too, his genius 
was critical. But it is not to be forgotten that he was the 
first to observe the transit of a planet across the sun's disc — 
verifying the prediction of Galileo — and that, as before 
mentioned, he made some valuable hydrographic corrections 
by means of lunar eclipses. 

As Gassendi is among the most literary of philosophers, 
so he is also among the most voluminous. Six volumes 
folio attest the vastness of his industry, no less than his 
erudition and versatility. These have been twice printed ; 
once at Lyons in 1658 under the editorship of Montmort 
and Sorbiere, and once at Florence in 1728. The first two 
volumes are occupied entirely with his Syntagma Philosoph- 
icum ; the third contains his critical writings on Epicurus, 
Aristotle, Descartes, Fludd, and Lord Herbert, with some 
occasional pieces on certain problems of physics; the 
fourth, his Institutio Astronomica, and his Commentarii de 
rebus celestibus ; the fifth, his commentary on the Tenth 
Book of Diogenes Lsertius, the biographies of Epicurus, 
Peiresc, Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, Peurbach, Regiomon- 
tanus, with some tracts on the value of Ancient Money, on 
the Roman Calendar, and on the theory of music ; to all 
which is appended a large and prolix piece, entitled Notitia 
Ecclesice Diniensis ; — the sixth volume contains his cor- 
respondence. The Lives, especially of Copernicus, Tycho, 
and Peiresc, have been justly admired. That of Peiresc 
has been repeatedly printed ; it has also been translated into 
English. Gassendi was one of the first, after the revival of 
letters, who treated the literature of philosophy in a lively 
way. His writings of this kind, though too laudatory and 
somewhat diffuse, have great merit ; they abound in those 
anecdotal details, natural yet not obvious reflections, and 
vivacious turns of thought, which made Gibbon style him, 
with some extravagance certainly, though it was true 
enough up to Gassendi's time — "le meilleur philosophe des 



298 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

litterateurs, et le meilleur litterateur des philosophes." Gas- 
sendi wrote in Latin ; it is to be regretted that he did not 
compose some of his works in French. There is little 
doubt that he would have given us another specimen of that 
happy philosophical style in which his countrymen have so 
signally excelled from Descartes' time downwards ; as it is, 
his writings, as might be expected from the qualities of his 
mind, are perspicuous and lucid in an eminent degree ; but 
the style is very diffuse, and, in many cases, cumbersome, a 
fault which it may be reasonably supposed would have been 
obviated if he had written in his vernacular. His illustra- 
tions and examples, especially in the leisurely exposition of 
the voluminous Syntagma Philosophicum, are often multi- 
plied to tediousness, though generally apt and well selected. 
Instances both of the merits and faults in question may be 
seen in the parts of the Syntagma where he treats " de Sen- 
sibus speciatim" and (more briefly) in the chapter " de 
Instinctu Brutorum." * 

The personal character of Gassendi must have been ex- 
ceedingly attractive. Of his winning manners, agreeable 
social qualities, and modesty, there is a pleasing proof re- 
corded by Sorbiere, and pleasantly repeated by De Gerando. 
" Marivat having travelled from Paris to Grenoble in his 
company without suspecting his name, desired on arriving 
to be presented to the celebrated Gassendi. lie was greatly 
surprised to recognize him in the amiable companion with 
whom he had conversed on the route. This behavior reminds 
us of that of Plato, when he returned from Syracuse into 
Greece." His temper and manners were such as became a 
philosopher, and a Christian philosopher rather than a dis- 
ciple of Epicurus ; whose precepts, if capable of being 
harmonized with virtue, are yet easily perverted to vice. 
It may be doubted whether any philosopher ever lived more 



Svntag; Phil. Physic*, part hi., sect, hi., lib. vii. 



vni. , cap. v. 



GASSENDI. 299 

philosophically than Gassendi, if we may judge by the tes- 
timony of Sorbiere in the preface to the Opera Omnia. His 
eulogiura records virtues which make us love the man even 
more than we revere the philosopher ; and with a trait or 
two from it we shall conclude this notice of his character. 
" When I consider his private life, I seem to see before me 
some anchorite, who, in the midst of a crowded city, has set 
up the severe rule of the desert ; so heartily did he embrace 
a life of poverty, chaste celibacy, and obedience, though un- 
constrained by any vows. Contented with little, he envied 
none their riches ; none the richer for the patronage of the 
wealthy, he dispensed whatever he received with a liberal 
hand. He was voluntarily abstemious, rarely touched flesh, 
generally subsisted on vegetables, and breakfasted and sup- 
ped on oatmeal porridge." Sorbiere pronounces a deserved 
eulogium on his modesty, humility, and benevolence. 

The precise character and position of the philosophic sys- 
tem of Gassendi has, like that of so many other philoso- 
phers, been much debated. It is a topic which there is no 
space to discuss here, but which cannot be wholly passed by, 
since from misapprehension Gassendi has been treated 
with less than justice by eminent philosophical critics, and 
among the rest by Dugald Stewart in the " Preliminary 
Dissertation." 

By critics in general, fifty years ago, he would have been 
regarded as a genuine precursor of the naked and undis- 
guised sensational French philosophy of the last century ; 
by other and later critics, he is represented as having taught 
a philosophy not very dissimilar in its main principles from 
that of Locke. Locke, indeed, is even supposed. by some to 
have derived more from the acute Frenchman than he has 
allowed the generality of his readers to suspect. Of this a 
word or two presently. 

Meantime, the truth with regard to Gassendi seems to be 
that, like many other philosophers who have written folios, 



300 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

and produced their works at distant intervals and under 
very different circumstances, he has not been altogether con- 
sistent in the exhibition of himself. Assuredly his tone is 
very different when urging with so much vigor all the possible 
" objections " which ingenuity could discover to Descartes' 
Meditations, and when systematically developing his own 
doctrines in his Syntagma Philosophicum. u The main 
scope/' says Dugald Stewart in the Preliminary Dissertation, 
"of Gassendi's argument against Descartes is to materialize 
that class of our ideas which the Lockists as well as the 
Cartesians consider as the exclusive objects of the power of 
reflection, and to show that these ideas are all ultimately re- 
solvable into images or conceptions borrowed from things 
external." If we look only at the animadversions on Des- 
cartes, there is much to favor these observations. But then, 
again, as Hallam justly observes, if we examine the Syntagma 
Philosophicum-, even the Proemial Book, even the Logic, but 
more especially the important chapters in the Physics " De 
Phantasia " and " De Intellectu," we cannot fail to perceive 
that this estimate is erroneous, and that Gassend! is very far 
indeed from resolving all the phenomena of mind into sensa- 
tion. This Hallam has truly remarked, and has supplied a 
few extracts from the above chapters of Gassendi in proof. 
The explanation of the apparent discrepancies:, this writer 
says, is difficult. u Whether he urged some of his objections 
against the Cartesian metaphysics with a regard to victory 
rather than truth, or, as would be the more candid and per- 
haps more reasonable hypothesis, he was induced by the 
acuteness of his great antagonist to review and reform his 
own opinions, I must leave to the philosophical reader." l 

It seems highly probable that both explanations arc cor- 
rect. In accepting Mersenne's invitation, issued by Descar- 
tes' commands, to find as much fault as possible with the 
celebrated Meditations (which made such pretensions to 
1 Literature of Europe, Vol. iv. p. 903. 



GASSENDI. 301 

logical rigor), Gassendi would naturally be tempted to 
urge every objection to the uttermost ; and would proba- 
bly challenge the proof of assertions, when he thought it 
weak, not less where he agreed with the conclusions them- 
selves than where he denied them. This seems to have been 
obviously his course in some cases. 1 In such a controversy 
the true position is apt often to be forgotten both by him 
who writes and by him who reads. Challenged to show the 
invalidity of the reasoning which is employed to support a 
given conclusion, the objector is apt to speak and to be in- 
terpreted as if he contended not only for the validity of his 
objections, but for an opposite conclusion from that of his 
opponent. This may or may not be. In Gassendi's case it 
is sometimes the conclusion as well as the reasoning, some- 
times the reasoning only, to which he is opposed. 

From Gassendi's " objections " his own positive opinions 
on the points in question are not always inferrible. We 
must look at his dogmatical explanations of his own views 
as a safer criterion, and we find these in the Syntagma. It 
must be added that a certain degree of personal feeling 
evidently gave sharpness to his criticisms on Descartes ; and 
philosopher though he was, being still a mortal man, this 
could not but exert some influence. On the other hand, 
when writing his Syntagma, Gassendi was freed from all 
such bias ; he was no longer the advocate, but the judge ; 
he had to show, not merely that such reasoning on behalf of 
such and such conclusions was not valid, but what conclu- 
sions he held himself. He had also had the opportunity of 
reading all his great antagonist's " criticisms " on his own 
" criticisms," and doubtless profited by them ; and lastly, 
though the interval, as Hallam says, between the contro- 
versy with Descartes and the commencement of the ponder- 

1 It must have been so when so severely challenging Descartes' 
proof of the immateriality of the sonl, or of the existence of the ma- 
terial world, for Gassendi denied neither. 
26 



302 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

ous Syntagma Philosophicum was but brief — the dates 
being 1641 and 1642 — yet before its author had reached 
the chapters " De Phantasia " and " De Intellectu " (nearly 
one thousand closely printed folio columns from the com- 
mencement), he would have had abundant time to review 
any opinions of an earlier date, and profit by the discussions 
with his illustrious opponent. 

Be this as it may, the chapter on the." Human Intellect " 
shows incontrovertibly that Gassendi was far removed from 
the sensationalists. While he maintains constantly his favor- 
ite maxim " that there is nothing in the intellect which has 
not been in the senses ; " while he contends that the imagi- 
native faculty, " phantasia," is the counterpart of sense ; that 
like that, as it has to do with material images, it is itself 
material, and essentially the same both in men and brutes, — 
the chapter " De Intellectu " plainly proves that he could 
consistently mean nothing more than that " sensations " are 
the invariable and indispensable antecedents and conditions 
of the evolution of the phenomena of intellect ; for he admits 
that the intellect, which he affirms to be "immaterial" — the 
most characteristic distinction of humanity — attains notions 
and truths of which no effort of sensation or imagination can 
give us the slightest apprehension. 1 He instances in the 
capacity of forming " general notions ; " in the very concep- 
tion of universality itself,' 2 to which he says brutes, who par- 
take as truly as men in the faculty he calls u phantasia," 
never attain ; in the notion of God, whom he says we may 
imagine to be corporeal, but understand to be incorporeal ; 



1 '• Itaque est in nobis intellectionis species qua ratioriaando co pro- 

veliiinur, at aliqaid intdliijamus, qwni imaginari sen cujus kabert obver- 

santcm immjinrm, quantumcunque animi rircis coiitiuihrimiis, noil possi- 

mus." — De bdeUectu, cap. ii. Opera, 'Pom. ii.. p. 883. 

- "Hon modo univeroalia, anirersaleisve notiones formamai, scd 
percipimaa qaoqae ipsam rationem univerealitatis." — ll>-, p. 384. 



GASSENDI. 303 

and lastly in the " reflex actions " by which the mind makes 
its own phenomena and operations the objects of attention. 1 

His remarks on the last point — his very phraseology, 
"actiones reflexive," certainly remind one of Locke, and 
have suggested that Gassendi's system was the source of 
Locke's. It was so, exclaims Stewart, of the false system 
of Locke into which the sensational schools of France dis- 
torted that of the English philosopher. To this it seems 
sufficient to reply, as before, that Gassendi himself, in his 
more deliberate exhibition of his philosophy, does not belong 
to those schools. At the same time, whether Locke had 
ever studied the system of Gassendi is somewhat doubtful. 
That he was not, at all events, conscious of any signal ob- 
ligations to Gassendi, may be inferred from the following 
reasons: — 1. Locke's distinct assertion, to Stillingfleet and 
others, that, right or wrong, his system had been the fruit 
of his own excogitation. 2. That if he had consciously 
borrowed from Gassendi, he, who was a model of honor and 
candor as a writer, would not have failed to acknowledge his 
obligations. 3. The very name of Gassendi scarcely occurs 
in all his writings ; 2 and though it may be said that this 
silence was natural if conscious that he had stolen, it is in- 
consistent with his character that he should have so acted ; 
the silence would have become a thief, but not John Locke. 
4. He was no helluo librorum, and the Syntagma extends to 
two ponderous folios. It is true that the abridgment by 
Bernier in eight volumes (if such an abuse of the term may 
be allowed) was published in 1678, and this, Locke, who 
was certainly in habits of intercourse with Bernier at Paris 

1 Alteram est genus reflexarum actionum quibus intellectus seip- 
sum, suasque functiones intelligit, ac speciatim se intelligere animad- 
vertit. Videlicet hoc munus est omni facilitate corporea superius. — 
De Intellectu, cap. ii., p. 384. 

2 He has just introduced his name in the controversy with Stilling- 
fleet, and that is" all. 



304 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

in 1677, might have seen. 5. But, supposing him to have 
seen it, what then? The utmost that can be said is, that it 
is probable that the remarks on the reflex operations of 
the mind, and the terms " actiones reflexives " (used, how- 
ever, by Gassendi not with a view to a classification of 
mental phenomena, but incidentally, in proof of the mind's im- 
materiality) may have unconsciously suggested to Locke his 
second great division of ideas, and the phraseology in which 
he has couched it. But the observations themselves are far 
too scanty to have been of much service to Locke in con- 
structing his general theory, still less in that elaborate and 
minute analysis of the "ideas of reflection," which consti- 
tutes the bulk of the " Essay." The whole of the two books 
on " Imagination " and " Intellect " in the Syntagma would 
not make above an eighth of Locke's " Essay," and the 
greater part of these is occupied with questions which 
Locke has expressly renounced as belonging to a hopeless 
psychology ; as, for example, whether imagination be ma- 
terial or immaterial (Gassendi deciding for the former) — 
of how many kinds, or how, mechanically or physiologically, 
related to sensation — whether and in what sense it can be 
said to possess reason — whether it be identical with the 
similar faculty in brutes. Such questions, together with the 
history of opinions, Gassendi is as prone to discuss as Locke 
to decline them. The opinion of De Gerando, however, on 
the relations of Locke's philosophy to Gassendi's. is well en- 
titled to attention. 



JAMES CRICHTON, 



James Crichton, commonly known by the appellation 
of the Admirable Crichton, was born on the 19th of August, 
1560. 1 His father was Robert Crichton, who, in conjunc- 
tion with John Spence, executed the office of lord advocate; 
his mother was Elizabeth, the only daughter of Sir James 
Stewart of Beath, by Margaret, the eldest daughter of Lord 
Lindsay of Byres. It appears highly probable, if not cer- 
tain, that by the father's side, he derived his lineage from 
Sir Robert Crichton of Sanquhar, ancestor of the earl of 
Dumfries ; and his maternal grandfather, ancestor of the earl 
of Moray, was the son of Lord Avandale, who was descended 
from Murdac duke of Albany, and through him from Robert 
II. It is indeed to be recollected that the birth of the first 
Lord Avandale was illegitimate ; but it is likewise to be recol- 
lected that he obtained letters of legitimation under the great 
seal. His grand-uncle Lord Methven was the third husband 

1 An Italian broadside, printed at Venice in 1580, states that he had 
completed the twentieth year of his age on the 19th of August. This 
curious document, which was lately discovered, and which affords 
some confirmation of the account which Manutius and Imperiali 
have given of Crichton's character and attainments, may be found in 
the appendix to the second edition of Mr. Tytler's Life of the Admi- 
rable Crichton, p. 289. Edinb. 1823, 12mo. 

26 * ( 805 ) 



306 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

of Margaret Tudor, the relict of James IV. It is therefore 
sufficiently obvious that he was entitled to speak of his high 
descent ; but his extraordinary endowments of mind con- 
ferred upon him much higher distinction than he could 
derive from any accidental circumstances of birth. The 
place of his birth is somewhat doubtful. According to one 
tradition, he was born in the castle of Cluny, situated on a 
small lake bearing the same name ; but as the father did not 
acquire his estate in Perthshire till two years after the birth 
of James, his eldest son, this may be considered as entitled 
to less attention than another tradition, which represents him 
as having been born at Elliock in Dumfriesshire, the more 
ancient seat of the family. The estate of Cluny, which 
belonged to the bishopric of Dunkeld, was conveyed to the 
king's advocate by Robert Crichton, the last popish bishop 
of that wealthy see. 

In the year 1570, when he had only attained the age of 
ten, he was sent to the university of St. Andrews, where he 
was entered at St. Salvator's College. According to Aldus 
Manutius, his father placed him under the tuition of Bu- 
chanan, Hepburn, Robertson, and Rutherford, who are all 
mentioned as very eminent persons. John Rutherford, 
whose name is sufficiently known, was provost of the col- 
lege to which Crichton belonged. Buchanan, who was prin- 
cipal of St. Leonard's College, resigned his office about the 
time when he became a student; but, according to the state- 
ment of his Italian friend, he was partially educated Along 
with the young king of Scotland; and Buchanan was ap- 
pointed to the office of preceptor to the king when he 
quitted St. Andrews, in the year 1570. On the 20th of 
March, 1573, or, according to our presenl mode of compu- 
tation, 1574, Crichton took the degree 6f A. B. lie pro- 
ceeded A. M. in the year L575, and thus completed the 
regular course of study at the premature age of fifteen. 
In the university of Si. Andrews, the candidates for the 



JAMES CRICHTON. 307 

higher degree were then distributed into circles, according 
to the comparative proficiency displayed in the course of 
their previous examinations. Each circle was likewise 
formed on the same principle. Of the thirty-six masters 
who took their degrees on this occasion, there were three 
circles ; and the third name in the first circle is that of 
James Crichton. At the head of the list appears David 
Monypenny. It is highly probable that Crichton was the 
youngest of all those graduates ; and as his proficiency was 
only excelled by two out of thirty -five, it is evident that he 
had already begun to distinguish himself by his extraordi- 
nary aptitude in the acquisition of knowledge. 

As the king was six years younger than Crichton, they 
could not well participate in the same studies, although they 
could receive instructions from the same tutors. Crichton 
must have continued to devote himself with intense ardor 
to the pursuits of science as well as literature; for to a 
knowledge of many languages he added a familiar acquaint- 
ance with the philosophy and even the theology of the age. 
The power of genius is shown in the use of the materials 
which are placed within its reach ; but there is no royal 
road to learning, which, if acquired to any extent, must be 
acquired by much labor and perseverance, although their 
particular degree must vary according to the quickness of 
apprehension and tenacity of memory belonging to various 
individuals. 

Crichton may for some time have enjoyed the benefit of 
such able instruction ; for he appears to have been still re- 
siding in Scotland towards the close of the year 1577. His 
subsequent movements are represented as being partly in- 
fluenced by some domestic disagreements. As the father 
embraced the reformed doctrines, while the son adhered to 
the ancient superstition, disputes and reproaches could 
scarcely fail to intervene at a crisis of such high and gen- 
eral excitement. The young scholar repaired to France, 



308 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

where he is said to have distinguished himself equally by 
his skill in literature and in arms. Of a marvellous dispu- 
tation which he held in the university of Paris, there is an 
account which passes very currently, although it is only 
stamped with the authority of Sir Thomas Urquhart. 
According to this account, he affixed a programme in the 
most public places of the city, inviting all men of learning 
to meet him, ^after an interval of six weeks, at the College 
of Navarre, where he should " be ready to answer to what 
should be propounded to him concerning any science, lib- 
eral art, discipline, or faculty, practical or theoretic, not ex- 
cluding the theological nor jurisprudential habits, though 
grounded but upon the testimonies of God and man, and 
that in any of these twelve languages, Hebrew, Syriac, 
Arabic, Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, English, 
Dutch, Flemish, and Sclavonian, in either verse or prose, at 
the discretion of the disputant : " 2 in the mean time, as we 
are duly instructed, " the admirable Scot (for so from thence- 
forth he was called) minding more his hawking, hunting, 
tilting, vaulting, riding of well-managed horses, tossing of 
the pike, handling of the musket, flourishing of colors, danc- 
ing, fencing, swimming, jumping, throwing of the bar. 
playing at the tennis, balloon, or long-catch, and sometimes 
at the house-games of dice, cards, playing at the chess, 

1 Urquhart's Discovery of a most exquisite Jewel, p, 94. Load. 
1652, 8vo. — This writer is pleased to inform us that about a fortnight 
before the appointed day of meeting, some person, loss acquainted with 
Crichton himself than with his reputation, subjoined the following 
sarcastic inscription to his programme on the gate of the Sorbonne : 
" If you would meet with this monster of perfection, to make search 
for him either in the taverne or bawdy-house, is the readiest way to 
find him." The hint for this part of the story is to all appearance 
borrowed from a work of mere fancy in which Boccalini relates that a 
similar mordacejacetia was practised upon Crichton, not in Pari*, but 
in Parnassus: " R chi lo vuol vedere, vada all' hostoria del Falcone, 
che li fara mostrato." (Ragguagli «li Parnaso, toin. i. p. 181.) 



JAMES CRICHTON. 309 

billiards, trou-madam, and other such like chamber sports, 
singing, playing on the lute, and other musical instruments." 
But when the appointed hour arrived, he acquitted himself 
with stupendous learning and ability, having for the space 
of nine hours maintained his ground against the most 
eminent antagonists in all the faculties. The rector of the 
university concluded the ceremony by presenting him with 
a diamond ring and a purse full of gold. It would be a 
mere waste of criticism to enter into a minute examination 
of the narrative to which we have now referred. The de- 
tails are sufficiently circumstantial, but they have much of 
the aspect of a downright romance ; and such details from 
the knight of Cromarty would have required the strong 
confirmation of collateral evidence. It might perhaps be 
admitted with some degree of safety that Crichton was en- 
gaged in a public disputation at Paris, and that he ac- 
quitted himself with consummate ability ; but as to his 
fluency in twelve languages, and his maintaining so long 
and powerful a contest, not merely with grammarians, 
rhetoricians, and philosophers, but even with theologians, 
canonists, and civilians, all these particulars must be re- 
ceived with extreme hesitation ; and perhaps it may be con- 
sidered as much more probable that such a disputation 
never took place at Paris but was merely fabricated from 
another, which took place at Venice. 

The intellectual endowments of Crichton seem to have 
been equalled by his personal accomplishments. He is 
highly celebrated for his martial powers, and as a complete 
master in the use of the sword and spear. Some degree of 
military experience he must have acquired during his 
two years' service in the civil wars of France ; but this term 
of service was apparently sufficient to gratify his youthful 
inclination for the life of a soldier ; and he next directed his 
steps towards Italy, where he must have arrived in the year 
1580. According to Dr. Mackenzie, he proceeded to Rome, 



310 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

and there gave another demonstration of his talents for pub- 
lic disputation ; 1 but this account is evidently destitute of all 
foundation, and the only authority alleged by its author is 
that of Boccalini, whose meaning is either completely mis- 
represented or completely misunderstood. Dempster has 
stated that he went to Genoa, attracted by the offer of a 
considerable salary ; but in what capacity he appeared there, 
we are left to conjecture. Whatever might be his first place 
of residence in Italy, it is at least ascertained that he arrived 
at Venice before the close of the year 1580. He now ad- 
dressed a Latin poem to the younger Aldus Manutius, a 
name highly celebrated in the annals of typography ; and 
this laid the foundation of a literary friendship, which was 
not without considerable influence in perpetuating his fame. 
He likewise formed an intimate acquaintance with other men 
of letters, particularly with Sperone Speroni, Lorenzo 
Massa, and Giovanni Donati. An ode addressed to Massa, 
and another to Donati, are preserved among his literary 
reliques. But the friendship of Manutius was distinguished 
by a more than ordinary degree of zeal : he highly extolled 
Crichton when living, and deeply bewailed him when dead. 
To the notices which he has introduced into his edition of 
Cicero, we are in a great measure indebted for our knowl- 
edge of the young scholar's proceedings in the territory of 
Venice. His edition of the Paradoxa Jie inscribed *' Nobi- 
lissimo juveni Jacoba Critonia Scoto ; " and the dedication, 
dated on the first of June, 1581, contains a recital of some 
of those literary exploits which astonished the Italians. 2 

1 Mackenzie's Lives of Scots Writers, vol. iii. p. 200. — From the 
very loose and erroneous account of Crichton which occurs in this 
work, was fabricated a separate tract published under the title of the 
Life of Jama Crichton of Clunir, commonly called the Admirable Crich- 
ton. Aherdeen, 17t'.0, Svo. 

2 The dedication of Aldus Manutius, together with the four Latin 
poems of Crichton, arc reprinted in Graevius's edition of Cicero 
De Officii*, re. Amst. 1 088, 8vo. They may likewise he found in 



JAMES CRICHTON. 311 

An oration which Crichton pronounced before the Doge 
and the nobility of Venice excited the admiration of his 
audience, by the eloquence of the composition, as well as 
by the gracefulness of the elocution, insomuch that the young 
orator was regarded as a person of the most extraordinary en- 
dowments. He afterwards engaged in various disputations 
on subjects of divinity, philosophy, and the mathematical 
sciences ; and such was the reputation which he now ac- 
quired, that, during the remainder of his short career, he 
seems to have been viewed as one of the wonders of Italy. 
It has been thought a circumstance worthy of being recorded 
in the life of Mazzoni, celebrated among his countrymen for 
his powers of literary debate, that he thrice encountered 
Crichton at Venice, and overwhelmed him by the astonish- 
ing copiousness and subtilty of his arguments. If it was 
reckoned an honor for a man of high reputation to sustain a 
contest with so youthful an antagonist, we cannot fail to per- 
ceive the singular estimation in which that antagonist must 
have been held. 

These intellectual exertions were succeeded by an infirm 
state of health, which continued for upwards of four months ; 
and before he had completely recovered, he made an excur- 
sion to Padua, the seat of a flourishing university. The 
professors in all the different faculties were invited to meet 
him in the house of a person of rank ; and there, in the 
midst of a numerous assembly, he exhibited new and strik- 
ing proofs of the versatility of his genius. He commenced 
his performances with the recitation of an extemporaneous 
poem in celebration of Padua ; a subject which was only 
then proposed to him, and which he treated in a manner 
that is described as very elegant. With much acuteness and 

the Biographia Britannica, vol. iv. p. 452, and in the appendix to Mr. 
Tytler's Life of the Admirable Crichton, p. 292. Only two of the 
poems, the hexameters on Venice and the ode to Manutius, occur in 
the Delicioe Poetarum Scotorum, torn. i. p. 268. 



312 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

learning, he afterwards discussed various topics of science 
with the doctors who were there assembled ; and it is particu- 
larly mentioned that he exposed many of the errors of Aris- 
totle and his commentators. Having thus displayed his 
knowledge for the space of six hours, the final theme pro- 
posed to him was the praise of ignorance ; and on this sub- 
ject he pronounced an oration, which still further excited the 
admiration of his learned auditors. A similar exhibition 
was announced to be held in the bishop's palace, but, for 
some reason which is not plainly stated, it did not take place. 
The popular applause which attended such demonstrations 
of intellectual superiority, had too natural a tendency to ex- 
cite envy, and to provoke detraction ; nor did Crichton 
escape that lot which has been common to so many others. 
On his return to Venice, he was induced by the malignity 
of certain individuals, whom he does not mention by name, 
to publish a remarkable programme, which has been pre- 
served by his friend Manutius. In order to expose the fu- 
tility of their cavils, he undertook to refute innumerable errors 
of Aristotle, and of all the Latin philosophers, that is, all the 
schoolmen, both in their expositions of his doctrines, and in 
their disquisitions on subjects of theology, together with the 
errors of certain professors of mathematics, and to answer 
such objections as might be urged against him. He further 
gave his antagonists the option of selecting their topics of dis- 
putation from any other branch of science, whether publicly 
taught in the schools, or privately investigated by the most 
profound philosophers ; and he undertook to return his an- 
swers, as the proponents should themselves determine, cither 
according to the usual figures of logic, according to the se- 
cret doctrine of numbers, or mathematical figures, or in any 
one out of a hundred different species of verse. The chal- 
lenge may appear sufficiently bold, if not arrogant ; but unless 
it came from a person who was conscious of possessing very 
extraordinary powers of intellect, and who had repeatedly 



JAMES CKICHTON. 313 

applied to them a severe and unequivocal test, it could 
scarcely be viewed in any other light than as an indication 
of insanity. He appealed to a community which included 
many competent judges of such pretensions, and therefore 
could not hope to impose upon an unlearned multitude. 
The appointed place of meeting was the church of St. John 
and St. Paul ; and there, for the space of three days, this 
young man sustained the arduous trial in a manner which 
fully justified his confidence in his own intellectual resources. 
His friend, Aldus Manutius, was a spectator of his triumphs 
upon this occasion ; and though some allowances must doubt- 
less be made for the warmth of friendship, and for an Italian 
taste in writing, it is still to be remembered that when he 
published his account, the event to which it referred was 
altogether recent, and he necessarily appealed to a cloud of 
living witnesses, who would have treated his panegyric with 
derision, if Crichton had obviously failed in supporting his 
own lofty pretensions. 

After his departure from Venice, he betook himself to 
Mantua ; and there, according to Urquhart's romantic nar- 
rative, he rendered himself very conspicuous by his valiant 
encounter with a fierce Italian gentleman, who had recently 
slain three antagonists. Crichton is said to have challenged 
this redoubtable champion, and after many efforts of mutual 
skill, to have brought the matter to this conclusion : " His 
right foot did beat the cadence of the blow that pierced the 
belly of this Italian ; whose heart and throat being hit with 
the two former stroaks, these three franch bouts given in 
upon the back of the other ; besides that, if lines were im- 
agined drawn from the hand that livered them, to the places 
which were marked by them, they would represent a perfect 
isosceles triangle, with a perpendicular from the top angle, 
cutting the basis in the middle." x The learned knight had 

1 Urquhart's Discovery of a most exquisite Jewel, p. 90. 
, * 27 



314 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

studied mathematics, and he seems to have been fully resolved 
that his knowledge should be turned to some account. This 
combat he has described in a very circumstantial manner ; 
but, viewing his unsupported authority with no small degree 
of suspicion, we feel no inclination to repeat his martial de- 
tails, which however, are not a little curious in themselves. 
But it is a fact confirmed by other evidence that Crichton was 
invited or attracted to the court of Mantua, and that the 
duke appointed him tutor to his son Vincenzo Gonzaga. 
Here, according to the knight of Cromarty, he displayed his 
dramatic talents as conspicuously as he had formerly dis- 
played his learning and his prowess. In the space of five 
hours, he is said to have represented fifteen different charac- 
ters, and to have supported each of them with marvellous ef- 
fect. But his brilliant career was speedily to close. When 
he was one evening walking in the streets of Mantua with his 
lute in his hand, he was unexpectedly assailed by three in- 
dividuals ; and drawing his sword, he pressed upon them 
with so much skill and resolution, that the principal aggres- 
sor was impelled by his fears to discover himself as young 
Gonzaga. Crichton fell upon his knees, and entreated for- 
giveness for an act which evidently inferred no guilt ; when 
the prince instantly pierced him through the body, and ter- 
minated the mortal existence of one of the most remarkable 
persons of the era to which he belonged. 1 This act of base 

1 Imperialis Mnsseuzn Historicum, p. 242. Yenetiis, 1040, 4to. — 
In mentioning their first encounter, he uses the expression, " con- 
sulto, an easu, incertum ; " nor are we in possession of any more 
specific information. With regard to the date, there is some degree 
of uncertainty. In the month of November, 15S3, Mamitius be- 
wailed his young friend as already dead, and pointedly referred to 
the fatal third of July. Imperial! likewise states that he died on the 
third of July, 1583. On the other hand, Serassi, in his Vita dd Maz- 
zoni, p. 127, speaks of a poem written by .lames Crichton on the death 
of Cardinal Borromeo, winch did not take place till the third o( No- 
vember, 1684. But for such a fact as this, the authority of Mamitius 



JAMES CRICHTON. 3l5 

ferocity was perpetrated on the third of July, 1583, when 
Crichton had nearly completed the twenty-third year of 
his age. 

The elegance of his person had procured him the admira- 
tion of those who were unable to estimate the powers of his 
mind. His countenance is described as beautiful ; but his 
right eye was marked, if not somewhat disfigured, by a red 
spot, or as Manutius describes it, a red rose by which it was 
surrounded. His reputation as a scholar did not render him 
indifferent to the more superficial accomplishments of a 
gentleman ; his address was courteous, and he was a pro- 
ficient in dancing, as well as in the gymnastic and martial 
exercises to which youth of his condition were then ad- 
dicted. 

The unrivalled fame of this young scholar is certainly 
allied to romance ; but, on the other hand, it is very difficult 
to imagine that it was not originally founded on some qual- 
ities which eminently distinguished him from other forward 
and aspiring youths, who at that period were sufficiently 
numerous in the more learned countries of Europe. A 
reputation so splendid, and so uniformly maintained, cannot 
reasonably be ascribed to a mere concurrence of accidental 
circumstances. The specimens of his Latin jDoetry which 
have been preserved do not indeed contain any thing very 
remarkable ; but they are few in number, and were not 
published by himself; nor does his reputation depend upon 
one species of excellence. He is celebrated for the won- 
derful facility with which he composed verses, for his 
knowledge of ten or twelve different languages, for his ac- 
quaintance with the writings of the fathers, for his uncom- 
mon powers of memory, and for his promptitude and acute- 
ness in public disputation. We must not therefore hastily 

cannot well be called in question ; and we must rather conclude that 
the poem was written by another James Crichton, or by some person 
who thought proper to adopt his name. 



316 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

conclude that he " was in Italy considered one of those liter- 
ary mountebanks who were numerous in that age ; " or that 
his reputation chiefly depends on the romantic flights of Sir 
Thomas Urquhart, who wrote about seventy years after his 
death. Joseph Scaliger, who flourished at the same period 
with himself, who professes to have obtained his information 
in Italy, and who besides was not too prone to admiration, 
mentions Crichton as a prodigious genius, and, indeed, 
enumerates all the most essential qualifications that are 
commonly ascribed to him. 1 His testimony, which is en- 
tirely overlooked by the late Dr. Black, is certainly of con- 
siderable weight and importance. Crichton is likewise ex- 
tolled in terms of the highest admiration, in a work pub- 
lished so early as the year 1609, by Dr. Abernethy, a 
native of Edinburgh, and a member of the university of 
Montpellier. The longer of the two poems which he wrote 
in celebration of his young countryman, commences with 
these verses : — 

O felix animi juvenis Chrichtone ! vigore 
Ingcnii volitante supra qui vcctus in astra 
Humanam sortem, et mortalis culmen honoris, 
Seu placuit Musas colere, aut glomeraminc campum 
Tundere cornipedis, pictisve ardescere in armis ; 
Grandia sublimis nuper miracula mentis 
Monstrasti attonito, ct rapuisti protinus orbi. 

To the early testimonies which we have already produced, 
many others, somewhat more recent, might easily be added ; 
and we are fully prepared to acquiesce in the opinion of Dr. 
Johnson, that of Crichton's history, " whatever we may 
suppress as surpassing credibility, yet we shall, upon ineon- 
testible authority, relate enough to rank him among prod- 
igies." 2 Dr. Kippis, who has written a copious account of 

1 Scaligorana, p. 58. - Adventurer, No. 81. 



JAMES CRICHTON. 317 

this renowned youth, has legitimately applied the test of 
criticism to several of the early notices ; and many of his 
strictures, particularly those on Urquhart and Mackenzie, 
every person of a sober judgment must admit to be too 
well founded. We have, however, placed no reliance on 
such authorities, but have derived all our materials from 
better sources. " He appears," says this biographer, " to 
have had a fine person, to have been adroit in his bodily 
exercises, to have possessed a peculiar facility in learning 
languages, to have enjoyed a remarkably quick and reten- 
tive memory, and to have excelled in a power of declama- 
tion, a fluency of speech, and a readiness of reply. His 
knowledge, likewise, was probably very uncommon for his 
years ; and this, in conjunction with his other qualities, en- 
abled him to shine in public disputation. But whether his 
knowledge and learning were accurate .or profound, may 
justly be questioned ; and it may equally be doubted whether 
he would have arisen to any extraordinary degree of emi- 
nence in the literary world. It will always be reflected 
upon with regret, that his early and untimely death pre- 
vented this matter from being brought to the test of experi- 
ment." x In all controversies, it is of the first importance to 
ascertain the real state of the question. In a youth of 
twenty-three, whatever superiority of intellect he may pos- 
sess, we do not expect to find the erudition of Scaliger or 
Salmasius. Those who extol Crichton as a very extra- 
ordinary person do not necessarily suppose that his attain- 
ments exceeded the limits of human genius ; but they may 
reasonably believe that in various departments of science 
and literature he arrived at a degree of proficiency wonder- 
fully premature ; that he evinced great energy of applica- 
tion, with unusual powers of memory n and that of the 
knowledge which he so rapidly acquired, he possessed so 

1 Biographia Britannica, vol. iv. p. 455. 
27 * 



318 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

ready a command, together with so much promptitude and 
acuteness of mental exertion, that he appeared as a prodigy 
among men of the ordinary standard of intellectual excel- 
lence. 1 

1 " Ce fut," says Bayle, " Tun des plus extraordinaires prodiges 
d'esprit qu'on ait j'amais vus." — (Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, 
torn. i. p. 941.) This is scarcely exceeded by the panegyric of Im- 
periali. See Musaeum Historicum, p. 241. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON, 



Samuel Johnson, one of the most eminent English writ- 
ers of the eighteenth century, was the son of Michael John- 
son, who was, at the beginning of that century, a magistrate 
of Lichfield, and a bookseller of great note in the midland 
counties. Michael's abilities and attainments seem to have 
been considerable. He was so well acquainted with the 
contents of the volumes which he exposed to sale, that the 
country rectors of Staffordshire and Worcestershire thought 
him an oracle on points of learning. Between him and the 
clergy, indeed, there was a strong religious and political 
sympathy. He was a zealous churchman, and, though he 
qualified himself for municipal office by taking the oaths to 
the sovereigns in possession, was to the last a Jacobite in 
heart. At his house, a house which is still pointed out to 
every traveller who visits Lichfield, Samuel was born on the 
18th of September, 1709. In the child the physical, intel- 
lectual, and moral peculiarities which afterward distinguished 
the man were plainly discernible ; great muscular strength 
accompanied by much awkwardness and many infirmities ; 
great quickness of parts, with a morbid propensity to sloth 
and procrastination ; a kind and generous heart, with a 
gloomy and irritable temper. He had inherited from his 
ancestors a scrofulous taint, which it was beyond the power 
-of medicine to remove. His parents were weak enough to 

(319) 



320 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

believe that the royal touch was a specific for this malady. 
In his third year he was taken up to London, inspected by 
the court surgeon, prayed over by the court chaplains, and 
stroked and presented with a piece of gold by Queen Anne. 
One of his earliest, recollections was that of a stately lady 
in a diamond stomacher and a long black hood. Her hand 
was applied in vain. The boy's features, which were orig- 
inally noble and not irregular, were distorted by his malady. 
His cheeks were deeply scarred. He lost for a time the sight 
of one eye, and he saw but very imperfectly with the other. 
But the force of his mind overcame every impediment. In- 
dolent as he was, he acquired knowledge with such ease and 
rapidity, that at every school to which he was sent he was 
soon the best scholar. From sixteen to eighteen he resided 
at home, and was left to his own devices. He learned much 
at this time, though his studies were without guidance and 
without plan. He ransacked his father's shelves, dipped 
into a multitude of books, read what was interesting, and 
passed over what was dull. An ordinary lad would have 
acquired little or no useful knowledge in such a way ; but 
much that was dull to ordinary lads was interesting to Sam- 
uel. He read little Greek ; for his proficiency in that lan- 
guage was not such that he could take much pleasure in the 
masters of attic poetry and eloquence. But he had left 
school a good Latinist, and he soon acquired, in the large 
and, miscellaneous library of which he now had the com- 
mand, an extensive knowledge of Latin literature. That 
Augustan delicacy of taste, which is the boast of the great 
public schools of England, he never possessed. But he was 
early familiar with some classical writers, who were quite 
unknown to the best scholars in the sixtli form at Eton. 
He was particularly attracted by the works of die grea! re- 
storers of learning. Once, while searching for some apples, 
he found a huge folio volume o\' Petrarch's works. The 
name excited his curiosity, and he eagerly devoured hun- 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 321 

dreds of pages. Indeed, the diction and versification of his 
own Latin compositions show that he had paid at least as 
much attention to modern copies from the antique as to the 
original models. 

While he was thus irregularly educating himself, his fam- 
ily was sinking into hopeless poverty. Old Michael John- 
son was much better qualified to pore upon books, and to 
talk about them, than to trade in them. His business de- 
clined ; his debts increased ; it was with difficulty that the 
daily expenses of his household were defrayed. It was out 
of his power to support his son at either university ; but a 
wealthy neighbor offered assistance ; and, in reliance on 
promises which proved to be of very little value, Samuel 
was entered at Pembroke College, Oxford. When the 
young scholar presented himself to the rulers of that 
society, they were amazed not more by his ungainly figure 
and eccentric manners than by the quantity of extensive 
and curious information he had picked up during many 
months of desultory, but not unprofitable study. On the 
first day of his residence he surprised his teachers by quot- 
ing Macrobius ; and one of the most learned among them 
declared, that he had never known a freshman of equal at- 
tainments. 

At Oxford, Johnson resided during about three years. 
He was poor, even to raggedness ; and his appearance ex- 
cited a mirth and a pity which were equally intolerable to 
his haughty spirit. He was driven from the quadrangle of 
Christ Church by the sneering looks which the members of 
that aristocratical society cast at the holes in his shoes. 
Some charitable person placed a new pair at his door ; but 
he spurned them away in a fury. Distress made him, not 
servile, but reckless and ungovernable. No opulent gentleman 
commoner, panting for one-and-twenty, could have treated 
the academical authorities with more gross disrespect. The 
needy scholar was generally to be seen under the gate of 



322 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

Pembroke, a gate now adorned with his effigy, haranguing a 
circle of lads, over whom, in spite of his tattered gown and 
dirty linen, his wit and audacity gave him an undisputed 
ascendency. In every mutiny against the discipline of the 
college he was the ringleader. Much was pardoned, how- 
ever, to a youth so highly distinguished by abilities and ac- 
quirements. He had early made himself known by turning 
Pope's Messiah into Latin verse. The style and rhythm, 
indeed, were not exactly Yirgilian ; but the translation 
found many admirers, and was read with pleasure by Pope 
himself. 

The time drew near at which Johnson would, in the ordi- 
nary course of things, have become a Bachelor of Arts : 
but he was at the end of his resources. Those promises of 
support on which he had relied had not been kept. His 
family could do nothing for him. His debts to Oxford 
tradesmen were small indeed, yet larger than he could pay. 
In the autumn of 1731, he was under the necessity of quit- 
ting the university without a degree. In the following win- 
ter his father died. The old man left but a pittance ; and 
of that pittance almost the whole was appropriated to the 
support of his widow. The property to which Samuel suc- 
ceeded amounted to no more than twenty pounds. 

His life, during the thirty years which followed, was one 
hard struggle with poverty. The misery of that struggle 
needed no aggravation, but was aggravated by the suffering 
of an unsound body and an unsound mind. Before the 
young man left the university, his hereditary malady had 
broken forth in a singularly cruel form. lie had become 
an incurable hypochondriac, lie said long after that he had 
been mad all his life, or at least not perfectly sane : and, in 
truth, eccentricities less strange than his have often been 
thought grounds sufficient for absolving felons, ami for set- 
ting aside wills. His grimaces, his gestures, his matter* 
ings, sometimes diverted and sometimes terrified people who 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 323 

did not know him. At a dinner-table he would, in a fit of 
absence, stoop down and twitch off a lady's shoe. He 
would amaze a drawing-room by suddenly ejaculating a 
clause of the Lord's Prayer. He would conceive an unin- 
telligible aversion to a particular alley, and perform a great 
circuit rather than see the hateful place. He would set his 
heart on touching every post in the streets through which 
he walked. If by any chance he missed a post, he would 
go back a hundred yards and repair the omission. Under 
the influence of his disease, his senses became morbidly 
torpid, and his imagination morbidly active. At one time 
he would stand poring on the town-clock without being 
able to tell the hour. At another, he would distinctly hear 
his mother, who was many miles off, calling him by his name. 
But this was not the worst.' A deep melancholy took pos- 
session of him, and gave a dark tinge to all his views of 
human nature and of human destiny. Such wretchedness 
as he endured has driven many men to shoot themselves or 
drown themselves. But he was under no temptation to 
commit suicide. He was sick of life ; but he was afraid of 
death ; and he shuddered at every sight or sound which 
reminded him of the inevitable hour. In religion he found 
but little comfort during his long and frequent fits of dejec- 
tion; for his religion partook of his own character. The 
light from heaven shone on him indeed, but not in a direct 
line, or with its own pure splendor. The rays had to 
struggle through a disturbing medium : they reached him 
refracted, dulled, and discolored by the thick gloom which 
had settled on his soul; and, though they might be suffi- 
ciently clear to guide him, were too dim to cheer him. 

With such infirmities of body and of mind, this celebrated 
man was left, at two-and-twenty, to fight his way through 
the world. He remained during about five years in the 
midland counties. At Lichfield, his birthplace and his 
early home, he had inherited some friends and acquired 



324 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

others. He was kindly noticed by Henry Hervey, a gay 
officer of noble family, who happened to be quartered 
there. Gilbert Walmesley, registrar of the ecclesiastical 
court of the diocese, a man of distinguished parts, learning, 
and knowledge of the world, did himself honor by patron- 
izing the young adventurer, whose repulsive person, unpol- 
ished manners, and squalid garb, moved many of the petty 
aristocracy of the neighborhood to laughter or to disgust. 
At Lichfield, however, Johnson could find no way of earn- 
ing a livelihood. He became usher of a grammar-school in 
Leicestershire ; he resided as a humble companion in the 
house of a country gentleman ; but a life of dependence was 
insupportable to his haughty spirit. He repaired to Bir- 
mingham, and there earned a few guineas by literary drudg- 
ery. In that town he printed a translation, little noticed at 
the time, and long forgotten, of a Latin book about Abys- 
sinia. He then put forth proposals for publishing by sub- 
scription the poems of Politian, with notes containing a his- 
tory of modern Latin verse ; but subscriptions did not come 
in ; and the volume never appeared. 

While leading this vagrant and miserable life, Johnson 
fell in love. The object of his passion was Mrs. Elizabeth 
Porter, a widow who had children as old as himself. To 
ordinary spectators, the lady appeared to be a short, fat, 
coarse woman, painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy 
colors, and fond of exhibiting provincial airs and graces 
which were not exactly those of the Queensborrvs and 
Lepels. To Johnson, however, whose passions were strong. 
whose eyesight was too weak to distinguish ceruse from 
natural bloom, and who had seldom or never been in the 
same room with a woman of real fashion, his Titty, as he 
called her, was the most beautiful, graceful, and accom- 
plished of her sex. That his admiration was unfeigned can- 
not be doubted ; for she was as poor as himself. She ac- 
cepted, with a readiness which did her little honor, the ad- 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 325 

dresses of a suitor who might have been her son. The 
marriage, however, in spite of occasional wranglings, proved 
happier than might have been expected. The lover con- 
tinued to be under the illusions of the wedding day till 
the lady died in her sixty-fourth year. On her monu- 
ment he placed an inscription, extolling the charms of her 
person and of her manners ; and when, long after her de- 
cease, he had occasion to mention her, he exclaimed, with a 
tenderness half ludicrous, half pathetic, " Pretty creature ! " 

His marriage made it necessary for him to exert himself 
more strenuously than he had hitherto done. He took a 
house in the neighborhood of his native town, and adver- 
tised for pupils. But eighteen months passed away ; and 
only three pupils came to his academy. Indeed, his ap- 
pearance was so strange, and his temper so violent, that his 
school-room must have resembled an ogre's den. Nor was 
the tawdry painted grandmother whom he called his Titty 
well qualified to make provision for the comfort of young 
gentlemen. David Garrick, who was one of the pupils, 
used, many years later, to throw the best company of London 
into convulsions of laughter by mimicking the endearments 
of this extraordinary pair. 

At length Johnson, in the twenty-eighth year of his age, 
determined to seek his fortune in the capital as a literary 
adventurer. He set out with a few guineas, three acts of 
the tragedy of Irene in manuscript, and two or three letters 
of introduction from his friend Walmesley. 

Never since literature became a calling in England had it 
been a less gainful calling than at the time when Johnson 
took up his residence in London. In the preceding gen- 
eration a writer of eminent merit was sure to be munificently 
rewarded by the government. The least that he could ex- 
pect was a pension or a sineeure place ; and if he showed 
any aptitude for politics, he might hope to be a member of 
parliament, a lord of the treasury, an embassador, a secre- 
28 



326 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

tary of state. It would be easy, on the other hand, to name 
several writers of the nineteenth century of whom the least 
successful has received forty thousand pounds from the 
booksellers. But Johnson entered on his vocation in the 
most dreary part of the dreary interval which separated two 
ages of prosperity. Literature had ceased to flourish under 
the patronage of the great, and had not begun to flourish 
under the patronage of the public. One man of letters, in- 
deed, Pope, had acquired by his pen what was then considered 
as a handsome fortune, and lived on a footing of equality with 
nobles and ministers of state. But this was a solitary ex- 
ception. Even an author whose reputation was established, 
and whose works were popular, such an author as Thomson, 
whose Seasons were in every library, such an author as 
Fielding, whose Pasquin had had a greater run than any 
drama since The Beggar's Opera, was sometimes glad to 
obtain, by pawning his best coat, the means of dining on 
tripe at a cook-shop underground, where he could wipe his 
hands, after his greasy meal, on the back of a Newfound- 
land dog. It is easy, therefore, to imagine what humil- 
iations and privations must have awaited the novice who 
had still to earn a name. One of the publishers to whom 
Johnson applied for employment measured with a scornful 
eye that athletic though uncouth frame, and exclaimed, 
" You had better get a porter's knot, and carry trunks." 
Nor was the advice bad, for a porter was likely to be is 
plentifully fed, and as comfortably lodged, as a poet. 

Some time appears to have elapsed before Johnson was 
able to form any literary connection from which he could 
expect more than bread for the day which was passing over 
him. He never forgot the generosity with which Ilrrvrv. 
who was now residing in London, relieved his wants during 
this time of trial. " Harry Ilervey." said the old philos- 
opher many years later, u was a vicious man : hut he WftS 
very kind tome. If you call a do^ Hervey, 1 --hall love 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 327 

him." At Hervey's table Johnson sometimes enjoyed 
feasts which were made more agreeable by contrast. But 
in general he dined, and thought that he dined well on six- 
penny worth of meat and a penny worth of bread at an ale- 
house near Drury Lane. 

The effect of the privations and sufferings which he en- 
dured at this time was discernible to the last in his temper 
and his deportment. His manners had never been courtly. 
They now became almost savage. Being frequently under 
the necessity of wearing shabby coats and dirty shirts, he 
became a confirmed sloven. Being often very hungry when 
he sate down to his meals, he contracted a habit of eating 
with ravenous greediness. Even to the end of his life, and 
even at the tables of the great, the sight of food affected him 
as it affects wild beasts and birds of prey. His taste in 
cookery, formed in subterranean ordinaries and Alamode 
beefshops, was far from delicate. Whenever he was so for- 
tunate as to have near him a hare that had been kept too 
long, or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged him- 
self with such violence that his veins swelled, and the moist- 
ure broke out on his forehead. The affronts which his 
poverty emboldened stupid and low-minded men to offer to 
him would have broken a mean spirit into sycophancy, but 
made him rude even to ferocity. Unhappily the insolence 
which, while it was defensive was pardonable, and in some 
sense respectable, accompanied him into societies where he 
was treated with courtesy and kindness. He was repeat- 
edly provoked into striking those who had taken liberties 
with him. All the sufferers, however, were wise enough to 
abstain from talking about their beatings, except Osborne, 
the most rapacious and brutal of booksellers, who pro- 
claimed everywhere that he had been knocked down by 
the huge fellow whom he had hired to puff the Harleian 
Library. 

About a vear after Johnson had begun to reside in 



328 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

London, he was fortunate enough to obtain regular employ- 
ment from Cave, an enterprising and intelligent bookseller, 
who was proprietor and editor of the Gentleman's Magazine. 
That journal, just entering on the ninth year of its long 
existence, was the only periodical work in the kingdom 
which then had what would now be called a large circula- 
tion. It was, indeed, the chief source of parliamentary 
intelligence. It was not then safe, even during a recess, to 
publish an account of the proceedings of either House with- 
out some disguise. Cave, however, ventured to entertain 
his readers with what he called Reports of the Debates of 
the Senate of Lilliput. France was Blefuscu ; London was 
Mildendo ; pounds were sprugs ; the Duke of Newcastle 
was the Nardac secretary of state; Lord Hardwicke was 
the Hurgo Hicrad; and William Pulteney was AVingul 
Pulnub. To write the speeches was, during several years, 
the business of Johnson. He was generally furnished with 
notes, meagre indeed, and inaccurate, of what had been said: 
but sometimes he had to find arguments and eloquence both 
for the ministry and for the opposition. He was himself a 
Tory, not from rational conviction — for his serious opinion 
was that one form of government was just as good or as bad 
as another — but from mere passion, such as inflamed the 
Capulets against the Montagues, or the Blues of the Roman 
circus against the Greens. In his infancy he had heard so 
much talk about the villainies of the Whins, and the dangers 
of the Church, that he had become a furious partisan when 
he could scarcely speak. Before he was three he had in- 
sisted on being taken to hear Sacheverel preach at Lichfield 
cathedral, and had listened to the sermon with as much 
respect, and probably with as much intelligence, as any 
Staffordshire squire in the congregation. The work which 
had been begun in the nursery had been completed by the 
university. Oxford, when Johnson resided there, was the 
most Jacobitieal place in England ; and Pembroke was one 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 329 

of the most Jacobitical colleges in Oxford. The prejudices 
which he brought up to London were scarcely less absurd 
than those of his own Tom Tempest. Charles II. and 
James II. were two of the best kings that ever reigned. 
Laud — a poor creature who never did, said, or wrote any 
thing indicating more than the ordinary capacity of an old 
woman — was a prodigy of parts and learning, over whose 
tomb Art and Genius still continued to weep. Hampden 
deserved no more honorable name than that of " the zealot 
of rebellion." Even the ship-money, condemned not less 
decidedly by Falkland and Clarendon than by the bitterest 
Roundheads, Johnson would not pronounce to have been an 
unconstitutional impost. Under a government the mildest 
that had ever been known in the world — under a govern- 
ment which allowed to the people an unprecedented liberty 
of speech and action — he fancied that he was a slave ; he 
assailed the ministry with obloquy which refuted itself, and 
regretted the lost freedom and happiness of those golden 
days in which a writer who had taken but one tenth part of 
the license allowed to him would have been pilloried, man- 
gled with the shears, whipped at the cart's-tail, and flung 
into a noisome dungeon to die. He hated dissenters and 
stockjobbers, the excise and the army, septennial parlia- 
ments and continental connections. He long had an aver- 
sion to the Scotch — an aversion of which he could not 
remember the commencement, but which, he owned, had 
probably originated in his abhorrence of the conduct of the 
nation during the Great Rebellion. It is easy to guess in 
what manner debates on great party questions were likely 
to be reported by a man whose judgment was so much dis« 
ordered by party spirit. A show of fairness was indeed 
necessary to the prosperity of the Magazine ; but Johnson 
long afterward owned that, though he had saved appearances, 
he had taken care that the Whig dogs should not have the 
best of it j arid, in fact, every passage which has lived — 
28* 



330 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

every passage which bears the marks of his higher facul- 
ties — is put into the mouth of some member of the op- 
position. 

A few weeks after Johnson had entered on these obscure 
labors, he published a work which at once placed him high 
among the writers of his age. It is probable that what he had 
suffered during his first year in London, had often reminded 
him of some parts of that noble poem in which Juvenal had 
described the misery and degradation of a needy man of let- 
ters, lodged among the pigeons' nests in the tottering gar- 
rets which overhung the streets of Rome. Pope's admirable 
imitations of Horace's Satires and Epistles had recently ap- 
peared, were in every hand, and were by many readers 
thought superior to the originals. What Pope had done for 
Horace, Johnson aspired to do for Juvenal. The enterprise 
was bold, and yet judicious. For between Johnson and 
Juvenal there was much in common — much more, certainly, 
than between Pope and Horace. 

Johnson's London appeared without his name in May, 
1738. He received only ten guineas for this stately and 
vigorous poem ; but the sale was rapid and the success com- 
plete. A second edition was required within a week. Those 
small critics who are always desirous to lower established 
reputations ran about proclaiming that the anonymous sati- 
rist was superior to Pope in Pope's own peculiar department 
of literature. It ought to be remembered, to the honor of 
Pope, that he joined heartily in the applause with which the 
appearance of a rival genius was welcomed. He made in- 
quiries about the author of London. Such a man. lie said, 
could not long be concealed. The name was soon discov- 
ered ; and Pope, with great kindness, exerted himself to 
obtain an academical degree and the mastership of a gram- 
mar-school for the poor young poet. The attempt failed, 
and Johnson remained a bookseller's hack. 

It does not appear that these two men — the most cmi- 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 331 

nent writer of the generation which was going out, and the 
most eminent writer of the generation which was coming in 
— ever saw each other. They lived in very different cir- 
cles — one surrounded by dukes and earls, the other by 
starving pamphleteers and index-makers. Among Johnson's 
associates at this time may be mentioned Boyse, who, when 
his shirts were pledged, scrawled Latin verses sitting up in 
bed with his arms through two holes in his blanket, who 
composed very respectable sacred poetry when he was sober, 
and who was at last run over by a hackney-coach when he 
was drunk ; Hoole, surnamed the metaphysical tailor, who, 
instead of attending to his measures, used to trace geometri- 
cal diagrams on the board where he sate cross-legged ; and 
the penitent impostor, George Psalmanazar, who, after poring 
all day, in an humble lodging, on the folios of Jewish rabbis 
and the Christian fathers, indulged himself at night with 
literary and theological conversation at an alehouse in the 
city. But the most remarkable of the persons with whom 
at this time Johnson consorted, was Richard Savage, an 
earl's son, a shoemaker's apprentice, and had seen life in all 
its forms, — who had feasted among blue ribbons in Saint 
James's Square, and had lain with fifty pounds' weight of 
irons on his legs in the condemned ward of Newgate. This 
man had, after many vicissitudes of fortune, sunk at last into 
abject and hopeless poverty. His pen had failed him. His 
patrons had been taken away by death, or estranged by the 
riotous profusion with which he squandered their bounty, 
and the ungrateful insolence with which he rejected their 
advice. He now lived by begging. He dined on venison 
and champagne whenever he had been so fortunate as to 
borrow a guinea. If his questing had been unsuccessful, 
he appeased the rage of hunger with some scraps of broken 
meat, and lay down to rest under the piazza of Covent 
Garden in warm weather, and, in cold weather, as near as 
he could get to the furnace of a glass-house. Yet, in his 



332 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

misery, he was still an agreeable companion. He had an 
inexhaustible store of anecdotes about that gay and brilliant 
world from which he was now an outcast. He had observed 
the great men of both parties in hours of careless relaxa- 
tion, had seen the leaders of opposition without the mask of 
patriotism, and had heard the prime minister roar with 
laughter and tell stories not over decent. During some 
months Savage lived in the closest familiarity with Johnson ; 
and then the friends parted, not without tears. Johnson 
remained in London to drudge for Cave, Savage went to 
the west of England, lived there as he had lived every- 
where, and, in 1743, died, penniless and heart-broken, in 
Bristol jail. 

Soon after his death, while the public curiosity was strongly 
excited about his extraordinary character, and his not less 
extraordinary adventures, a life of him appeared widely 
different from the catchpenny lives of eminent men which 
were then a staple article of manufacture in Grub Street. 
The style was indeed deficient in ease and variety ; and the 
writer was evidently too partial to the Latin element of our 
language. But the little work with all its faults was a mas- 
terpiece. No finer specimen of literary biography existed 
in any language, living or dead ; and a discerning critic 
might have confidently predicted that the author was des- 
tined to be the founder of a new school of English elo- 
quence. 

The Life of Savage was anonymous; but it was well 
known in literary circles that Johnson was the writer. Dur- 
ing the three years which followed, lie produced no impor- 
tant work ; but he was not, and indeed could not be, idle. 
The fame of his abilities and learning continued to grow. 
Warburton pronounced him a man of parts and genius ; 
and the praise of Warburton was then no light thing. Such 
was Johnson's reputation that, in 17 17, several eminent 
booksellers combined to employ him in the arduous work of 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 333 

preparing a Dictionary of the English Language, in two 
folio volumes. The sum which they agreed to pay him was 
only fifteen hundred guineas ; and out of this sum he had to 
pay several poor men of letters who assisted him in the 
humbler parts of his task. 

The Prospectus of the Dictionary he addressed to the 
Earl of Chesterfield. Chesterfield had long been celebrated 
for the politeness of his manners, the brilliancy of his wit, 
and the delicacy of his taste. He was acknowledged to be 
the finest speaker in the House of Lords. He had recently 
governed Ireland, at a momentous conjuncture, with emi- 
nent firmness, wisdom, and humanity ; and he had since be- 
come Secretary of State. He received Johnson's homage 
with the most winning affability, and requited it with a few 
guineas, bestowed doubtless in a very graceful manner, but 
was by no means desirous to see all his carpets blackened 
with the London mud, and his soups and wines thrown to 
right and left over the gowns of fine ladies and the waist- 
coats of fine gentlemen, by an absent, awkward scholar, who 
gave strange starts and uttered strange growls, who dressed 
like a scarecrow, and ate like a cormorant. During some 
time Johnson continued to call on his patron, but after being 
repeatedly told by the porter that his lordship was not at 
home, took the hint, and ceased to present himself at the in- 
hospitable door. 

Johnson had flattered himself that he should have completed 
his Dictionary by the end of 1750, but it was not till 1755 
that he at length gave his huge volumes to the world. 
During the seven years which he passed in the drudgery 
of penning definitions and marking quotations for transcrip- 
tion, he sought for relaxation in literary labor of a more 
agreeable kind. In 1749 he published the Vanity of Human 
Wishes, an excellent imitation of the Tenth Satire of Juve- 
nal. It is in truth not easy to say Avhether the palm belongs 
to the ancient or to the modern poet. The couplets in which 



334 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

the fall of Wolsey is described, though lofty and sonorous, 
are feeble when compared with the wonderful lines which 
bring before us all Rome in tumult on the day of the fall of 
Sejanus, the laurels on the door-posts, the white bull stalk- 
ing toward the Capitol, the statues rolling down from their 
pedestals, the flatterers of the disgraced minister running to 
see him dragged with a hook through the streets, and to 
have a kick at his carcass before it is hurled into the Tiber. 
It must be owned, too, that in the concluding passage the 
Christian moralist has not made the most of his advantages, 
and has fallen decidedly short of the sublimity of his pagan 
model. On the other hand, Juvenal's Hannibal must yield 
to Johnson's Charles ; and Johnson's vigorous and pathetic 
enumeration of the miseries of a literary life must be allowed 
to be superior to Juvenal's lamentation over the fate of De- 
mosthenes and Cicero. 

For the copyright of the Vanity of Human Wishes John- 
son received only fifteen guineas. 

A few days after the publication of this poem,"his tragedy, 
begun many years before, was brought on the stage. His 
pupil, David Garrick, had, in 1741, made his appearance on 
a humble stage in Goodman's Fields, had at once risen to 
the first place among actors, and was now, after several 
years of almost uninterrupted success, manager of Drury 
Lane Theatre. The relation between him and his old pre- 
ceptor was of a very singular kind. They repelled each 
other strongly, and yet attracted each other strongly. Na- 
ture had made them of very different clay ; and circum- 
stances had fully brought out the natural peculiarities of both. 
Sudden prosperity had turned Garrick's head. Continued 
adversity had soured Johnson's temper. Johnson saw with 
more envy than became so great a man the villa, the plate, 
the china, the Brussels carpet, which the little mimic had 
got by repeating, with grimaces and gesticulations, what 
wiser men had written ; and the exquisitely sensitive van- 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 335 

ity of Garrick was galled by the thought that, while all the 
rest of the world was applauding him, he could obtain from 
one morose cynic, whose opinion it was impossible to de- 
spise, scarcely any compliment not acidulated with scorn. 
Yet the two Lichfield men had so many early recollections 
in common, and sympathized with each other on so many 
points on which they sympathized with nobody else in the 
vast population of the capital, that, though the master was 
often provoked by the monkey-like impertinence of the pu- 
pil, and the pupil by the bearish rudeness of the master, they 
remained friends till they were parted by death. Garrick 
now brought Irene out, with alterations sufficient to displease 
the author, yet not sufficient to make the piece pleasing to 
the audience. The public, however, listened, with little 
emotion, but with much civility, to five acts of monotonous 
declamation. After nine representations the play was with- 
drawn. It is, indeed, altogether unsuited to the stage, and, 
even when perused in the closet, will be found hardly wor- 
thy of the author. He had not the slightest notion of what 
blank verse should be. A change in the last syllable of 
every other line would make the versification of the Vanity 
of Human Wishes closely resemble the versification of 
Irene. The poet, however, cleared, by his benefit nights, 
and by the sale of the copyright of his tragedy, about three 
hundred pounds, then a great sum in his estimation. 

About a year after the representation of Irene, he began 
to publish a series of short essays on morals, manners, and 
literature. This species of composition had been brought 
into fashion by the success of the Tatler, and by the still 
more brilliant success of the Spectator. A crowd of small 
writers had vainly attempted to rival Addison. The Lay 
Monastery, the Censor, the Freethinker, the Plain Dealer, 
the Champion, and other works of the same kind, had had 
their short day. None of them had obtained a permanent 
place in our literature ; and they are now to be found only 



336 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

in the libraries of the curious. At length Johnson under- 
took the adventure in which so many aspirants had failed. 
In the thirty-sixth year after the appearance of the last 
number of the Spectator appeared the first number of the 
Rambler. From March 1750 to March 1752, this paper 
continued to come out every Tuesday and Saturday. 

From the first, the Rambler was enthusiastically admired 
by a few eminent men. Richardson, when only five num- 
bers had appeared, pronounced it equal, if not superior, to 
the Spectator. Young and Hartley expressed their appro- 
bation not less warmly. Bubb Dodington, among whose 
many faults indifference to the claims of genius and learn- 
ing cannot be reckoned, solicited the acquaintance of the 
writer. In consequence probably of the good offices of 
Dodington, who was then the confidential adviser of Prince 
Frederic, two of his Royal Highness's gentlemen carried a 
gracious message to the printing-office, and ordered seven 
copies for Leicester house. But these overtures seem to 
have been very coldly received. Johnson had had enough 
of the patronage of the great to last him all his life, and 
was not disposed to haunt any other door as he had haunted 
the door of Chesterfield. 

By the public the Rambler was at first very coldly re- 
ceived. Though the price of a number was only twopence, 
the sale did not amount to five hundred. The profits were 
therefore very small. But as soon as the flying leaves were 
collected and reprinted, they became popular. The author 
lived to see thirteen thousand copies spread over England 
alone. Separate editions were published for the Scotch 
and Irish markets. A large party pronounced the style per- 
fect, so absolutely perfect that in some essays it would be 
impossible for the writer himself to alter a single word for 
the better. Another party, not less numerous, vehemently 
accused him of having corrupted the purity of the English 
tongue. The best critics admitted that his diction was too 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 337 

monotonous, too obviously artificial, and now and then tur- 
gid even to absurdity. But they did justice to the acuteness 
of his observations on morals and manners, to the constant 
precision and frequent brilliancy of his language, to the 
weighty and magnificent eloquence of many serious pas- 
sages, and to the solemn yet pleasing humor of some of the 
lighter papers. On the question of precedence between 
Addison and Johnson, a question which, seventy years ago, 
was much disputed, posterity has pronounced a decision 
from which there is no appeal. Sir Roger, his chaplain and 
his butler, Will Wimble and Will Honeycomb, the Vision 
of Mirza, the Journal of the Retired Citizen, the Everlast- 
ing Club, the Dunmow Flitch, the Loves of Hilpah and 
Shalum, the Visit to the Exchange, and the Visit to the 
Abbey are known to everybody. But many men and 
women, even of highly cultivated minds, are unacquainted 
with Squire Bluster and Mrs. Busy, Quisquilius and Ve- 
nustulus, the Allegory of Wit and Learning, the Chronicle 
of the Revolutions of a Garret, and the sad fate of Anin- 
gait and Ajut. 

The last Rambler was written in a sad and gloomy hour. 
Mrs. Johnson had been given over by the physician. Three 
days later she died. She left her husband almost broken- 
hearted. Many people had been surprised to see a man of 
his genius and learning, stooping to every drudgery, and 
denying himself almost every comfort, for the purpose of 
supplying a silly, affected old woman with superfluities, 
which she accepted with but little gratitude. But all his 
affection had been concentrated on her. He had neither 
brother nor sister, neither son nor daughter. To him she 
was beautiful as the Gunnings, and witty as Lady Mary. 
Her opinion of his writings was more important to him 
than the voice of the pit of Drury Lane Theatre, or the 
judgment of the Monthly Review. The chief support 

29 



338 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

which had sustained him through the most arduous labor of 
his life, was the hope that she would enjoy the fame and the 
profit which he anticipated from his Dictionary. She was 
gone; and, in that vast labyrinth of streets, peopled by 
eight hundred thousand human beings, he was alone. Yet 
it was necessary for him to set himself, as he expressed it, 
doggedly to work. After three more laborious years, the 
Dictionary was at length complete. 

It had been generally supposed that this great work 
would be dedicated to the eloquent and accomplished noble- 
man to whom the Prospectus had been addressed. He well 
knew the value of such a compliment; and therefore, when 
the day of publication drew near, he exerted himself to 
soothe, by a show of zealous and at the same time of deli- 
cate and judicious kindness, the pride which he had so 
cruelly wounded. Since the Rambler had ceased to appear, 
the town had been entertained by a journal called The 
World, to which many men of high rank and fashion con- 
tributed. In two successive numbers of the World, the 
Dictionary was, to use the modern phrase, puffed with won- 
derful skill. The writings of Johnson were warmly praised. 
It was proposed that he should be invested with the author- 
ity of a Dictator, nay, of a Pope, over our language, and 
that his decisions about the meaning and the spelling of 
words should be received as final. His two folios, it was 
said, would of course be bought by everybody who could 
afford to buy them. It was soon known that these papers 
were written by Chesterfield. But the just resentment of 
Johnson was not to be so appeased. In a letter written 
with singular energy and dignity of thought and language, 
he repelled the tardy advances of his patron. The Dic- 
tiiuiiinj oajne forth without a dedication. In the preface the 
author truly declared that he owed nothing to the great, and 
described the difficulties with which he had been let't to 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 339 

struggle so forcibly and pathetically, that the ablest and 
most malevolent of all the enemies of his fame, Home 
Tooke, never could read that passage without tears. 

The public, on this occasion, did Johnson full justice, and 
something more than justice. The best lexicographer may 
well be content, if his productions are received by the world 
with cold esteem. But Johnson's Dictionary was hailed 
with an enthusiasm such as no similar work has ever ex- 
cited. It was indeed the first dictionary which could be 
read with pleasure. The definitions show so much acute- 
ness of thought and command of language, and the passages 
quoted from poets, divines, and philosophers, are so skil- 
fully selected, that a leisure hour may always be very agree- 
ably spent in turning over the pages. The faults of the 
book resolve themselves, for the most part, into one great 
fault. Johnson was a wretched etymologist. He knew 
little or nothing of any Teutonic language except English, 
which, indeed, as he wrote it, was scarcely a Teutonic lan- 
guage ; and thus he was absolutely at the mercy of Junius 
and Skinner. 

The Dictionary, though it raised Johnson's fame, added 
nothing to his pecuniary means. The fifteen hundred 
guineas which the booksellers had agreed to pay him, had 
been advanced and spent before the last sheets issued from 
the press. It is painful to relate that, twice in the course 
of the year which followed the publication of this great 
work, he was arrested and carried to spunging-houses, and 
that he was twice indebted for his liberty to his excellent 
friend Richardson. It was still necessary for the man who 
had been formally saluted by the highest authority as Dic- 
tator of the English language to supply his wants by con- 
stant toil. lie abridged his Dictionary. He proposed to 
bring out an edition of Shakspeare by subscription ; and 
many subscribers sent in their names, and laid down their 
money ; but he soon found the task so little to his taste, 



340 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

that he turned to more attractive employments. He con- 
tributed many papers to a new monthly journal, which was 
called the Literary Magazine. Few of these papers have 
much interest ; but among them was the very best thing 
that he ever wrote, a masterpiece both of reasoning and of 
satirical pleasantry, the review of Jenyns's Inquiry into the 
Nature and Origin of Evil. 

In the spring of 1758 Johnson put forth the first of a 
series of essays, entitled The Idler. During two years 
these essays continued to appear weekly. They were 
eagerly read, widely circulated, and, indeed, impudently 
pirated while they were still in the original form, and had a 
large sale when collected into volumes. The Idler may 
be described as a second part of the Rambler, somewhat 
livelier and somewhat weaker than the first part. 

While Johnson was busied with his Idlers, his mother, who 
had accomplished her ninetieth year, died at Lichfield. It 
was long since he had seen her ; but he had not failed to 
contribute largely out of his small means, to her comfort. 
In order to defray the charges of her funeral, and to pay 
some debts which she had left, he wrote a little book in a 
single week, and sent off the sheets to the press without 
reading them over. A hundred pounds were paid him for 
the copyright ; and the purchasers had great cause to be 
pleased with their bargain ; for the book was Rasselas. 

The success of Rasselas was great, though such ladies as 
Miss Lydia Languish must have been previously disap- 
pointed when they found that the new volume from the cir- 
culating library was little more than a dissertation on the 
author's favorite theme, the Vanity of Human Wishes; 
that the Prince of Abyssinia was without a mistress, and 
the Princess without a lover; and that the story set the 
hero and the heroine down exactly where it had taken them 
up. The style was the subject of much eager controversy. 
The Monthly Review and the Critical Review took different 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 341 

sides. Many readers pronounced the writer a pompous 
pedant, who would never use a word of two syllables where 
it was possible to use a word of six, and who could not 
make a waiting woman relate her adventures without bal- 
ancing every noun with another noun, and every epithet 
with another epithet. Another party, not less zealous, cited 
with delight numerous passages in which weighty meaning 
was expressed with accuracy and illustrated with splendor. 
And both the censure and the praise were merited. 

About the plan of Rasselas little was said by the critics ; 
and yet the faults of the plan might seem to invite severe 
criticism. Johnson has frequently blamed Shakspeare for 
neglecting the proprieties of time and place, and for ascrib- 
ing to one age or nation the manners and opinions of 
another. Yet Shakspeare has not sinned in this way more 
grievously than Johnson. Rasselas and Imlac, Nekayah 
and Pekuah, are evidently meant to be Abyssinians of the 
eighteenth century ; for the Europe which Imlac describes 
is the Europe of the eighteenth century ; and the inmates 
of the Happy Valley talk familiarly of that law of gravita- 
tion which Newton discovered, and which was not fully 
received even at Cambridge till the eighteenth century. 
What a real company of Abyssinians would have been may 
be learned from Bruce's Travels. But Johnson, not content 
with turning filthy savages, ignorant of their letters, and 
gorged with raw steaks cut from living cows, into philoso- 
phers as eloquent and enlightened as himself or his friend 
Burke, and into ladies as highly accomplished as Mrs. Len- 
nox or Mrs. Sheridan, transferred the whole domestic sys- 
tem of England to Egypt. Into a land of harems, a land 
of polygamy, a land where women are married without ever 
being seen, he introduced the flirtations and jealousies of our 
ballrooms. In a land where there is boundless liberty of 
divorce, wedlock is described as the indissoluble compact. 
"A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought to? 
29* 



342 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

gether by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, 
go home, and dream of each other. Such," says Rasselas, 
" is the common process of marriage." Such it may have 
been, and may still be, in London, but assuredly not at 
Cairo. A writer who was guilty of such improprieties had 
little right to blame the poet who made Hector quote Aris- 
totle, and represented Julio Romano as flourishing in the 
days of the oracle of Delphi. 

By such exertions as have been described, Johnson sup- 
ported himself till the year 1762. In that year a great 
change in his circumstances took place. He had from a 
child been an enemy of the reigning dynasty. His Jacobite 
prejudices had been exhibited with little disguise both in his 
works and in his conversation. Even in his massy and 
elaborate Dictionary, he had, with a strange want of taste 
and judgment, inserted bitter and contumelious reflections 
on the Whig party. The excise, which was a favorite re- 
source of Whig financiers, he had designated as a hateful 
tax. He had railed against the commissioners of excise in 
language so coarse, that they had seriously thought of pros- 
ecuting him. He had with difficulty been prevented from 
holding up the Lord Privy Seal by name as an example of 
the meaning of the word " renegade." A pension he had 
defined as pay given to a state hireling to betray his coun- 
try ; a pensioner as a slave of state hired by a stipend to 
obey a master. It seemed unlikely that the author of these 
definitions would himself be pensioned. But that was a 
time of wonders. George the Third had ascended the 
throne ; and had, in the course of a few months, disgusted 
many of the old friends, and conciliated many of the old 
enemies of his hou&e. The city was becoming mutinous. 
Oxford was becoming loyal. Cavendishes and Bentineks 
were murmuring. Somersets and Wyndhams were hasten- 
ing to kiss hands. The head of the treasury was now Lord 
Bute, who was a Tory, and could have no objection to 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 343 

Johnson's Toryism. Bute wished to be thought a patron of 
men of letters ; and Johnson was one of the most eminent 
and one of the most needy men of letters in Europe. A 
pension of three hundred a year was graciously offered, and 
with very little hesitation accepted. 

This event produced a change in Johnson's whole way of 
life. For the first time since his boyhood he no longer felt 
the daily goad urging him to the daily toil. He was at lib- 
erty, after thirty years of anxiety and drudgery, to indulge 
his constitutional indolence, to lie in bed till two in the after- 
noon, and to sit up talking till four in the morning, without 
fearing either the printer's devil or the sheriff's officer. 

One laborious task indeed he had bound himself to per- 
form. He had received large subscriptions for his promised 
edition of Shakspeare ; he had lived on those subscriptions 
during some years ; and he could not without disgrace omit 
to perform his part of the contract. His friends repeatedly 
exhorted him to make an effort ; and he repeatedly resolved 
to do so. But, notwithstanding their exhortations and his 
resolutions, month followed month, year followed year, and 
nothing was done. He prayed fervently against his idle- 
ness ; he determined, as often as he received the sacrament, 
that he would no longer doze away and trifle away his 
time ; but the spell under which he lay resisted prayer and 
sacrament. His private notes at this time are made up of 
self-reproaches. " My indolence," he wrote on Easter eve 
in 1764, "has sunk into grosser sluggishness. A kind of 
strange oblivion has overspread me, so that I know not 
what has become of the last year." Easter 1765 came, and 
found him still in the same state. " My time," he wrote, 
" has been unprofitably spent, and seems as a dream that 
has left nothing behind. My memory grows confused, and 
I know not how the days pass over me." Happily for his 
honor, the charm which held him captive was at length 
broken by no gentle or friendly hand. He had been weak 



344 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

enough to pay serious attention to a story about a ghost 
which haunted a house in Cock Lane, and bad actually gone 
himself, with some of his friends, at one in the morning, to 
St. John's Church, Clerkenwell, in the hope of receiving a 
communication from the perturbed spirit. But the spirit, 
though adjured with all solemnity, remained obstinately 
silent ; and it soon appeared that a naughty girl of eleven 
had been amusing herself by making fools of so many phi- 
losophers. Churchill, who, confident in his powers, drunk 
with popularity, and burning with party spirit, was looking 
for some man of established fame and Tory politics to 
insult, celebrated the Cock Lane Ghost in three cantos, 
nicknamed Johnson Pomposo, asked where the book was 
which had been so long promised and so liberally paid for, 
and directly accused the great moralist of cheating. This 
terrible word proved effectual; and in October, 1765, ap- 
peared, after a delay of nine years, the New Edition of 
Shakspeare. 

This publication saved Johnson's character for honesty, 
but added nothing to the fame of his abilities and learning. 
The preface, though it contains some good passages, is not 
in his best manner. The most valuable notes are those in 
which he had an opportunity of showing how attentively he 
had during many years observed human life and human 
nature. The best specimen is the note on the character of 
Polonius. Nothing so good is to be found even in TVilhehn 
Meister's admirable examination of Hamlet. But here 
praise must end. It would be difficult to name a more 
slovenly, a more worthless edition of any great elas.-ic. 
The reader may turn over play after play without finding 
one happy conjectural emendation, or one ingenious and 
satisfactory explanation of a passage which had baffled pre- 
ceding commentators. Johnson had, in bis Prospectus, told 
the world that he was peculiarly iitted for the task which he 
had undertaken, because he had, as a lexicographer, been 



SAMUEL- JOHNSON. 345 

under the necessity of taking a wider view of the English 
language than any of his predecessors. That his knowl- 
edge of our literature was extensive is indisputable. But, 
unfortunately, he had altogether neglected that very part of 
our literature with which it is especially desirable that an 
editor of Shakspeare should be conversant. It is dangerous 
to assert a negative. Yet little will be risked by the asser- 
tion, that in the two folio volumes of the English Dictionary, 
there is not a single passage quoted from any dramatist of 
the Elizabethan age, except Shakspeare and Ben. Even 
from Ben the quotations are few. Johnson might easily, in 
a few months, have made himself well acquainted with 
every old play that was extant. But it never seems to 
have occurred to him that this was a necessary preparation 
for the work which he had undertaken. He would doubt- 
less have admitted, that it would be the height of absurdity 
in a man who was not familiar with the works of JEschylus 
and Euripides, to publish an edition of Sophocles. Yet he 
ventured to publish an edition of Shakspeare, without hav- 
ing ever in his life, as far as can be discovered, read a single 
scene of Massinger, Ford, Decker, Webster, Marlow, Beau- 
mont, or Fletcher. His detractors were noisy and scurril- 
ous. Those who most loved and honored him, had little to 
say in praise of the manner in which he had discharged 
the duty of a commentator. He had, however, acquitted 
himself of a debt which had long lain heavy on his con- 
science, and he sank back into the repose from which the 
sting of satire had roused him. He long continued to live 
upon the fame which he had already won. He was honored 
by the University of Oxford with a Doctor's degree, by the 
Eoyal Academy with a professorship, and by the King with 
an interview, in which his Majesty most graciously ex- 
pressed a hope that so excellent a writer would not cease to 
write. In the interval, however, between 1765 and 1775, 
Johnson published only two or three political tracts, the 



346 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

longest of which he could have produced in forty-eight 
hours, if he had worked as he worked on the Life of Sav- 
age and on Rasselas. 

But, though his pen was now idle, his tongue was active. 
The influence exercised by his conversation, directly upon 
those with whom he lived and indirectly on the whole liter- 
ary world, was altogether without a parallel. His colloquial 
talents were indeed of the highest order. He had strong 
sense, quick discernment, wit, humor, immense knowledge 
of literature and of life, and an infinite store of curious 
anecdotes. As respected style, he spoke far better than he 
wrote. Every sentence which dropped from his lips was as 
correct in structure as the most nicely balanced period of 
the Rambler. But in his talk there were no pompous 
triads, and little more than a fair proportion of words in 
osity and ation. All was simplicity, ease, and vigor. He 
uttered his short, weighty, and pointed sentences, with a 
power of voice, and a justness and energy of emphasis, of 
which the effect was rather increased than diminished by the 
rollings of his huge form, and by the asthmatic gaspings 
and puffings in which the peals of his eloquence generally 
ended. Nor did the laziness which made him unwilling to 
sit down to his desk, prevent him from giving instruction or 
entertainment orally. To discuss questions of taste, of 
learning, of casuistry, in language so exact and so forcible 
that it might have been printed without the alteration of a 
word, was to him no exertion, but a pleasure, lie loved, as 
he said, to fold his legs and have his talk out. He was 
ready to bestow the overflowings of his full mind on any- 
body who would start a subject, on a fellow-passenger in a 
sta^e -coach, or on the person who sate at the same table 
with him in an eating-house. But his conversation was no- 
where so brilliant and striking as when he was surrounded 
by a few friends, whose abilities and knowledge enabled 
them, as he once expressed it, to send him back every ball 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 347 

that he threw. Some of these, in 1764, formed themselves 
into a club, which gradually became a formidable power in 
the commonwealth of letters. The verdicts pronounced by 
this conclave on new books were speedily known over all 
London, and were sufficient to sell off a whole edition in a 
day, or to condemn the sheets to the service of the trunk- 
maker and the pastry-cook. Nor shall we think this strange, 
when w r e consider what great and various talents and ac- 
quirements met in the little fraternity. Goldsmith was the 
representative of poetry and light literature, Reynolds of the 
arts, Burke of political eloquence and political philosophy. 
There, too, were Gibbon, the greatest historian, and Jones, 
the greatest linguist, of the age. Garrick brought to the 
meeting his inexhaustible pleasantry, his incomparable mim- 
icry, and his consummate knowledge of stage effect. Among 
the most constant attendants were two high-born and high- 
bred gentlemen, closely bound together by friendship, but of 
widely different characters and habits : Bennet Langton, 
distinguished by his skill in Greek literature, by the ortho- 
doxy of his opinions, and by the sanctity of his life ; and 
Topham Beauclerk, renowned for his amours, his knowl- 
edge of the gay world, his fastidious taste, and his sarcastic 
wit. To predominate over such a society was not easy. 
Yet even over such a society Johnson predominated. Burke 
might indeed have disputed the supremacy to which others 
were under the necessity of submitting. But Burke, though 
not generally a very patient listener, was content to take the 
second part when Johnson was present ; and the club itself, 
consisting of so many eminent men, is to this day popularly 
designated as Johnson's club. 

Among the members of this celebrated body was one to 
whom it has owed the greater part of its celebrity, yet who 
was regarded with little respect by his brethren, and had 
not without difficulty obtained a seat among them. This 
was James Boswell, a young Scotch lawyer, heir to an hon- 



348 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

orable name and a fair estate. That he was a coxcomb and 
a bore, weak, vain, pushing, curious, garrulous, was obvious 
to all who were acquainted with him. That he could not 
reason, that he had no wit, no humor, no eloquence, is ap- 
parent from his writings. And yet his writings are read 
beyond the Mississippi, and under the Southern Cross, and 
are likely to be read as long as the English exists, either as 
a living or as a dead language. Nature had made him a 
slave and an idolater. His mind resembled those creepers 
which the botanists call parasites, and which can subsist only 
by clinging round the stems and imbibing the juices of 
stronger plants. He must have fastened himself on some- 
body. He might have fastened himself on "Wilkes, and 
have become the fiercest patriot in the Bill of Rights So- 
ciety. He might have fastened himself on Whitfield, and 
have become the loudest field preacher among the Calvin- 
istic Methodists. In a happy hour he fastened himself on 
Johnson. The pair might seem ill matched. For Johnson 
had early been prejudiced against Bos well's country. To a 
man of Johnson's strong understanding and irritable temper, 
the silly egotism and adulation of Boswell must have been 
as teasing as the constant buzz of a fly. Johnson hated to 
be questioned ; and Boswell was eternally catechizing him 
on all sorts of subjects, and sometimes propounded such 
questions as, " What would you do, Sir, if you were locked 
up in a tower with a baby?" Johnson was a water drinker 
and Boswell was a winebibber, and indeed little better than 
an habitual sot. It was impossible that there should be per- 
fect harmony between two such companions. Indeed, the 
great man was sometimes provoked into fits of passion, in 
which he said things which the small man. during a few 
hours, seriously resented. Every quarrel, however, was 
soon made up. During twenty years the disciple continued 
to worship the master: the master continued to scold the 
disciple, to sneer at him, and to love him. The two friends 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 349 

ordinarily resided at a great distance from each other. 
Boswell practised in the Parliament House of Edinburgh, 
and could pay only occasional visits to London. During 
those visits his chief business was to watch Johnson, to dis- 
cover all Johnson's habits, to turn the conversation to sub- 
jects about which Johnson was likely to say something re- 
markable, and to fill quarto note-books with minutes of what 
Johnson had said. In this way were gathered the materials 
out of which was afterwards constructed the most interesting 
biographical work in the world. 

Soon after the club began to exist, Johnson formed a con- 
nection less important indeed to his fame, but much more 
important to his happiness, than his connection with Boswell. 
Henry Thrale, one of the most opulent brewers in the king- 
dom, a man of sound and cultivated understanding, rigid 
principles, and liberal spirit, was married to one of those 
clever, kind-hearted, engaging, vain, pert young women, 
who are perpetually doing or saying what is not exactly 
right, but who, do or say what they may, are always agree- 
able. In 1765 the Thrales became acquainted with John- 
son, and the acquaintance ripened fast into friendship. They 
were astonished and delighted by the brilliancy of his con- 
versation. They were flattered by finding that a man so 
widely celebrated preferred their house to any other in 
London. Even the peculiarities which seemed to unfit him 
for civilized society, his gesticulations, his rollings, his puf- 
fings, his mutterings, the strange way in which he put on his 
clothes, the ravenous eagerness with which he devoured his 
dinner, his fits of melancholy, his fits of anger, his frequent 
rudeness, his occasional ferocity, increased the interest which 
his new associates took in him. For these things were the 
cruel marks left behind by a life which had been one long con- 
flict with disease and with adversity. In a vulgar hack writ- 
er, such oddities would have excited only disgust. But in a 
man of genius, learning, and virtue, their effect was to add 
30 



350 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

pity to admiration and esteem. Johnson soon had an apart- 
ment at the brewery in Southwark, and a still more pleasant 
apartment at the villa of his friends on Streatham Common. 
A large part of every year he passed in those abodes, abodes 
which must have seemed magnificent and luxurious indeed, 
when compared with the dens in which he had generally been 
lodged. But his chief pleasures were derived from what 
the astronomer of his Abyssinian tale called '' the endearing 
elegance of female friendship." Mrs. Thrale rallied him, 
soothed him, coaxed him, and, if she sometimes provoked 
him by her flippancy, made ample amends by listening to 
his reproofs with angelic sweetness of temper. "When he 
was diseased in body and in mind, she was the most tender 
of nurses. No comfort that wealth could purchase, no con- 
trivance that womanly ingenuity, set to work by womanly 
compassion, could devise, was wanting to his sick room. He 
requited her kindness by an affection pure as the affection 
of a father, yet delicately tinged with a gallantry, which, 
though awkward, must have been more flattering than the 
attentions of a crowd of the fools who gloried in the names, 
now obsolete, of Buck and Maccaroni. It should seem that 
a full half of Johnson's life, during about sixteen years, was 
passed under the roof of the Thrales. He accompanied the 
family sometimes to Bath, and sometimes to Brighton, once 
to "Wales, and once to Paris. But he had at tin 1 same time 
a house in one of the narrow and gloomy courts on the 
north of Fleet Street. In the garrets was his librarw a 
large and miscellaneous collection of books, falling to pi 
and begrimmed with dust. On a lower floor he sometimes, 
but very rarely, regaled a friend with a plain dinner, a veal 
pie, or a leg of lamb and spinage, and a rice pudding. Net 
was the dwelling uninhabited during his long absences. It 
was the home of the most extraordinary assemblage of in- 
mates that ever was brought together. At the head of the 
establishment Johnson had placed an old lady named "Wil- 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 351 

liams, whose chief recommendations were her blindness and 
her poverty. But, in spite of her murmurs and reproaches 
he gave an asylum to another lady who was as poor as her- 
self, Mrs. Desmoulins, whose family he had known many 
years before in Staffordshire. Room was found for the 
daughter of Mrs. Desmoulins, and for another destitute 
damsel, who was generally addressed as Miss Carmichael, 
but whom her generous host called Polly. An old quack 
doctor named Levett, who bled and dosed coal-heavers and 
hackney coachmen, and received for fees crusts of bread, 
bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and sometimes a little copper, 
completed this strange menagerie. All these poor creatures 
were at constant war with each other, and with Johnson's 
negro servant Frank. Sometimes, indeed, they transferred 
their hostilities from the servant to the master, complained 
that a better table was not kept for them, and railed or 
maundered till their benefactor was glad to make his escape 
to Streatham, or to the Mitre Tavern. And yet he, who 
was generally the haughtiest and most irritable of mankind, 
who was but too prompt to resent any thing which looked 
like a slight on the part of a purse-proud bookseller, or of a 
noble and powerful patron, bore patiently from mendicants, 
who, but for his bounty, must have gone to the workhouse, 
insults more provoking than those for which he had knocked 
down Osborne and bidden defiance to Chesterfield. Year 
after year Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Desmoulins, Polly and 
Levett, continued to torment him and to live upon him. 

The course of life which has been described was inter- 
rupted in Johnson's sixty-fourth year by an important event. 
He had early read an account of the Hebrides, and had 
been much interested by learning that there was so near 
him a land peopled by a race which was still as rude and 
simple as in the Middle Ages. A wish to become intimate- 
ly acquainted with a state of society so utterly unlike all 
that he had ever seen frequently crossed his mind. But it 



352 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

is not probable that his curiosity would have overcome his 
habitual sluggishness, and his love of the smoke, the mud, 
and the cries of London, had not Boswell importuned him 
to attempt the adventure, and offered to be his squire. At 
length, in August, 1773, Johnson crossed the Highland line, 
and plunged courageously into what was then considered by 
most Englishmen as a dreary and perilous wilderness. 
After wandering about two months through the Celtic 
region, sometimes in rude boats which did not protect him 
from the rain, and sometimes on small shaggy ponies which 
could hardly bear his weight, he returned to his old haunts 
with a mind full of new images and new theories. During 
the following year he employed himself in recording his ad- 
ventures. About the beginning of 1775, his Journey to the 
Hebrides was published, and was, during some weeks, the 
chief subject of conversation in all circles in which any at- 
tention was paid to literature. The book is still read with 
pleasure. The narrative is entertaining; the speculations, 
whether sound or unsound, are always ingenious ; and the 
style, though too stiff and pompous, is somewhat easier 
and more graceful than that of his early writings. His 
prejudice against the Scotch had at length become little 
more than matter of jest; and whatever remained of the 
old feeling had been effectually removed by the kind and 
respectful hospitality with which he had been received 
in every part of Scotland. It was, of course, not to be ex- 
pected that an Oxonian Tory should praise the Presbyterian 
polity and ritual, or that an eye accustomed to the hedgerows 
and parks of England should not be struck by the bareness 
of Berwickshire and East Lothian. Hut even in censure 
Johnson's tone is not unfriendly. The most enlightened 
Scotchmen, with Lord Mansfield at their head, were well 
phased. But some foolish and ignorant Scotchmen were 
moved to anger by a little unpalatable truth which was 
mingled with much eulogy, and assailed him whom they 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 353 

chose to consider as the enemy of their country with libels 
much more dishonorable to their country than any thing that 
he had ever said or written. They published paragraphs in 
the newspapers, articles in the magazines, sixpenny pam- 
phlets, five-shilling books. One scribbler abused Johnson 
for being blear-eyed ; another for being a pensioner ; a third 
informed the world that one of the Doctor's uncles had been 
convicted of felony in Scotland, and had found that there 
was in that country one tree capable of supporting the 
weight of an Englishman. Macpherson, whose Fingal had 
been proved in the Journey to be an impudent forgery, 
threatened to take vengeance with a cane. The only effect 
of this threat was that Johnson reiterated the charge of 
forgery in the most contemptuous terms, and walked about 
during some time, with a cudgel, which, if the impostor had 
not been too wise to encounter it, would assuredly have de- 
scended upon him, to borrow the sublime language of his 
own epic poem, " like a hammer on the red son of the fur- 
nace." 

Of other assailants Johnson took no notice whatever. He 
had early resolved never to be drawn into controversy ; and 
he adhered to his resolution with a steadfastness which is 
the more extraordinary because he was, both intellectually 
and morally, of the stuff of which controversialists are made. 
In conversation he was a singularly eager, acute, and perti- 
nacious disputant. When at a loss for good reasons, he had 
recourse to sophistry ; and when heated by altercation, he 
made unsparing use of sarcasm and invective. But when 
he took his pen in his hand, his whole character seemed to 
be changed. A hundred bad writers misrepresented him and 
reviled him ; but not one of the hundred could boast of hav- 
ing been thought by him worthy of a refutation, or even of 
a retort. The Kenricks, Campbells, MacNichols, and Hen- 
dersons did their best to annoy him, in the hope that he 
would give them importance by answering them. But the 

30* 



354 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

reader will in vain search his works for any allusion to Ken- 
rick or Campbell, to MacNichol or Henderson. One 
Scotchman, bent on vindicating the fame of Scotch learn- 
ing, defied him to the combat in a detestable Latin hex- 
ameter. 

" Maxima, si tu vis, cupio contendrc tecum." 

But Johnson took no notice of the challenge. He had 
learned, both from his own observation and from literary 
history, in which he was deeply read, that the place of books 
in the public estimation is fixed, not by what is written about 
them, but by what is written in them ; and that an author 
whose works are likely to live is very unwise if he stoops to 
wrangle with detractors whose works are certain to die. 
He always maintained that fame was a shuttlecock, which 
could be kept up only by being beaten back, as well as 
beaten forward, and which would soon fall if there were 
only one battledore. No saying was oftener in his mouth 
than that fine apothegm of Bentley, that no man was ever 
written down but by himself. 

Unhappily, a few months after the appearance of the Jour- 
ney to the Hebrides, Johnson did what none of his envious 
assailants could have done, and, to a certain extent, succeeded 
in writing himself down. The disputes between England 
and her American colonies had reached a point at which no 
amicable adjustment was possible. Civil war was evidently 
impending; and the ministers seem to have thought that the 
eloquence of Johnson might, with advantage, be employed 
to inflame the nation against the opposition here, and against 
the rebels beyond the Atlantic, lie had already written 
two Or three tracts in defence of the foreign and doine.-tic 
policy of the government ; and those tracts, though hardly 
worthy of him, Mere much superior to the crowd of pam- 
phlets which lay OB the counters of Ahnon and Stoekdale. 

Hut his Taxation \<> Tyranny was a pitiable failure. The 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 355 

very title was a silly phrase, which can have been recom- 
mended to his choice by nothing but a jingling alliteration 
which he ought to have despised. The arguments were 
such as boys use in debating societies. The pleasantry was 
as awkward as the gambols of a hippopotamus. Even Bos- 
well was forced to own that, in this unfortunate piece, he 
could detect no trace of his master's powers. The general 
opinion was, that the strong faculties which had produced 
the Dictionary and the Rambler were beginning to feel the 
effect of time and of disease, and that the old man would best 
consult his credit by writing no more. 

But this was a great mistake. Johnson had failed, not 
because his mind was less vigorous than when he wrote 
Rasselas in the evenings of a week, but because he had 
foolishly chosen, or suffered others to choose for him, a sub- 
ject such as he would at no time have been competent to 
treat. He was in no sense a statesman. He never willingly 
read, or thought, or talked about affairs of state. He loved 
biography, literary history, the history of manners ; but 
political history was positively distasteful to him. The 
question at issue between the colonies and the mother 
country was a question about which he had really nothing 
to say. He failed, therefore, as the greatest men must fail 
when they attempt to do that for which they are unfit ; as 
Burke would have failed if Burke had tried to write come- 
dies like those of Sheridan ; as Reynolds would have failed 
if Reynolds had tried to paint landscapes like those of Wil- 
son. Happily, Johnson soon had an opportunity of proving 
most signally that his failure was not to be ascribed to intel- 
lectual decay. 

On Easter eve, 1777, some persons, deputed by a meet- 
ing which consisted of forty of the first booksellers in Lon- 
don, called upon him. Though he had some scruples about 
doing business at that season, he received his visitors with 



356 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

much civility. They came to inform him that a new edition 
of the English poets, from Cowley downward, was in con- 
templation, and to ask him to furnish short biographical pre- 
faces. He readily undertook the task, a task for which he 
was preeminently qualified. His knowledge of the literary 
history of England since the Restoration was unrivalled. 
That knowledge he had derived partly from books, and partly 
from sources which had long been closed ; from old Grub 
Street traditions ; from the talk of forgotten poetasters and 
pamphleteers who had long been lying in parish vaults ; from 
the recollections of such men as Gilbert Walmesley, who 
had conversed with the wits of Button ; Cibber, who had 
mutilated the plays of two generations of dramatists ; 
Orrery, who had been admitted to the society of Swift ; and 
Savage, who had rendered services of no very honorable 
kind to Pope. The biographer, therefore, sate down to his 
task with a mind full of matter. He had at first intended to 
give only a paragraph to every minor poet, and only four 
or five pages to the greatest name. But the flood of anec- 
dote and criticism overflowed the narrow channel. The 
work, which was originally meant to consist only of a few- 
sheets, swelled into ten volumes — small volumes, it is true, 
and not closely printed. The first four appeared in 1 7 7 i ♦ . 
the remaining six in 1781. 

The Lives of the Poets are, on the whole, the best of 
Johnson's works. The narratives are as entertaining as any 
novel. The remarks on life and on human nature are emi- 
nently shrewd and profound. The criticisms are often ex- 
cellent, and, even when grossly and provokingly unjust, well 
deserve to be studied ; for, however erroneous they may be, 
they are never silly. They are the judgments of a mind 
trammelled by prejudice and deficient in sensibility, but vig- 
orous and acute. They therefore generally contain a por- 
tion of valuable truth which deserves to be separated from 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 357 

the alloy ; and, at the very worst, they mean something, a 
praise to which much of what is called criticism in our time 
has no pretensions. 

Savage's Life Johnson reprinted nearly as it had ap- 
peared in 1744. Whoever, after reading that life, will turn 
to the other lives, will be struck by the difference of style. 
Since Johnson had been at ease in his circumstances, he had 
written little and had talked much. When, therefore, he, 
after the lapse of years, resumed his pen, the mannerism 
which he had contracted while he was in the constant habit of 
elaborate composition was less perceptible than formerly; 
and his diction frequently had a colloquial ease which it had 
formerly wanted. The improvement may be discerned by a 
skilful critic in the Journey to the Hebrides, and in the 
Lives of the Poets is so obvious that it cannot escape the 
notice of the most careless reader. 

Among the Lives the best are perhaps those of Cowley, 
Dryden, and Pope. The very worst is, beyond all doubt, 
that of Gray. 

This great work at once became popular. There was, 
indeed, much just and much unjust censure : but even those 
who were loudest in blame were attracted by the book in 
spite of themselves. Malone computed the gains of the 
publishers at live or six thousand pounds. But the writer 
was very poorly remunerated. Intending at first to write 
very short prefaces, he had stipulated for only two hundred 
guineas. The booksellers, when they saw how far his per- 
formance had surpassed his promise, added only another 
hundred. Indeed, Johnson, though he did not despise, or 
affect to despise money, and though his strong sense and 
long experience ought to have qualified him to protect his 
own interests, seems to have been singularly unskilful and 
unlucky in his literary bargains. He was generally re- 
puted the first English writer of his time. Yet several 
writers of his time sold their copyrights for sums such as he 



358 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

m 

never ventured to ask. To give a single instance, Robert- 
son received four thousand five hundred pounds for the His- 
tory of Charles V., and it is no disrespect to the memory 
of Robertson to say that the History of Charles V. is both 
a less valuable and less amusing book than the Lives of 
the Poets. 

Johnson was now in his seventy-second year. The infirm- 
ities of age were coming fast upon him. That inevitable 
event, of which he never thought without horror, was brought 
near to him ; and his whole life was darkened by the shadow 
of death. He had often to pay the cruel price of longevity. 
Every year he lost what could never be replaced. The 
strange dependents to whom he had given shelter, and to 
whom, in spite of their faults, he was strongly attached by 
habit, dropped off one by one ; and, in the silence of his 
home, he regretted even the noise of their scolding matches. 
The kind and generous Thrale was no more ; and it would 
have been well if his wife had been laid beside him. But 
she survived to be the laughing-stock of those who had en- 
vied her, and to draw from the eyas of the old man who had 
loved her beyond any thing in the world, tears far more 
bitter than he would hav^ shed over her grave. With some 
estimable, and many agreeable qualities, she was not made 
to be independent. The control of a mind more steadfast 
than her own was necessary to her respectability. While 
she was restrained by her husband, a man of sense and 
firmness, indulgent to her taste in trifles, but always the un- 
disputed master of his house, her worst offences had been 
impertinent jokes, white lies, and short tits of pettishne>s 
ending in sunny good-humor. But he was gone ; and she 
was left an opulent widow of forty, with strong sensibility, 
volatile fancy, and slender judgment. She BOOB fell in love 
with a Dmsic-master from Brescia, in whom nobody but her- 
self could discover any tiling to admire. Her pride, and 
perhaps some better feelings, struggled hard against this 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 359 

degrading passion. But the struggle irritated her nerves, 
soured her temper, and at length endangered her health. 
Conscious that her choice was one which Johnson could not 
approve, she became desirous to escape from his inspection. 
Her manner toward him changed. She was sometimes cold 
and sometimes petulant. She did not conceal her joy when 
he left Streatham : she never pressed him to return ; and, 
if he came unbidden, she received him in a manner which 
convinced him that he was no longer a welcome guest. He 
took the very intelligible hints which she gave. He read, 
for the last time, a chapter of the Greek Testament in the 
library which had been formed by himself. In a solemn 
and tender prayer he commended the house and its inmates 
to the Divine protection, and, with emotions which choked 
his voice and convulsed his powerful frame, left forever that 
beloved home for the gloomy and desolate house behind 
Fleet Street, where the few and evil days which still re- 
mained to him were to run out. Here, in June, 1783, he 
had a paralytic stroke, from which, however, he recovered, 
and which does not appear to have at all impaired his intel- 
lectual faculties. But other maladies came thick upon him. 
His asthma tormented him day and night. Dropsical symp- 
toms made their appearance. While sinking under a com- 
plication of diseases, he heard that the woman whose friend- 
ship had been the chief happiness of sixteen years of his 
life had married an Italian fiddler; that all London was 
crying shame upon her ; and that the newspapers and maga- 
zines were filled with allusions to the Ephesian matron and 
the two pictures in Hamlet. He vehemently said that he 
would try to forget her existence. He never uttered her 
name. Every memorial of her which met his eye he flung 
into the fire. She, meanwhile, fled from the laughter and 
hisses of her countrymen and countrywomen to a land where 
she was unknown, hastened across Mount Cenis, and learned, 
while passing a merry Christmas of concerts and lemonade 



360 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

parties at Milan, that the great man, with whose name hers 
is inseparably associated, had ceased to exist. 

He had, in spite of much mental and much bodily afflic- 
tion, clung vehemently to life. The feeling described in 
that fine but gloomy paper which closes the series of his 
Idlers seemed to grow stronger in him as his last hour drew 
near. He fancied that he should be able to draw his breath 
more easily in a southern climate, and would probably have 
set out for Rome and Naples but for his fear of the expense 
of the journey. That expense, indeed, he had the means of 
defraying ; for he had laid up about two thousand pounds, 
the fruit of labors which had made the fortune of several 
publishers. But he was unwilling to break in upon this 
hoard, and he seems to have wished even to keep its ex- 
istence a secret. Some of his friends hoped that the gov- 
ernment might be induced to increase his pension to six 
hundred pounds a year, but this hope was disappointed, ami 
he resolved to stand one English winter more. That winter 
was his last. His legs grew weaker ; his breath grew 
shorter ; the fatal water gathered fast, in spite of incisions 
which he, courageous against pain, but timid against death, 
urged his surgeons to make deeper and deeper. Though 
the tender care which had mitigated his sufferings during 
months of sickness at Streatham was withdrawn, he was not 
left desolate. The ablest physicians and surgeons attended 
him, and refused to accept fees from him. Burke parted 
from him with deep emotion. "Windham sate much in the 
sick room, arranged the pillows, and sent his own servant to 
watch at night by the bed. Frances Barney, whom the old 
man had cherished with fatherly kindness, stood weeping, at 
the door; while Langton, whose piety eminently qualified 

him to be an adviser and comforter at such a time, received 
the last pressure of his friend's hand within. "When at 
length the moment, dreaded through so many years, came 
close, the dark cloud passed away from Johnson's mind. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 361 

His temper became unusually patient and gentle ; he ceased 
to think with terror of death, and of that which lies beyond 
death ; and he spoke much of the mercy of God, and of the 
propitiation of Christ. In this serene frame of mind he 
died on the 13th of December, 1784. He was laid, a week 
later, in Westminster Abbey, among the eminent men of 
whom he had been the historian — Cowley and Denham, 
Dryden and Congreve, Gay, Prior, and Addison. 

Since his death the popularity of his works — the Lives 
of the Poets, and, perhaps, the Vanity of Human Wishes, 
excepted — has greatly diminished. His Dictionary has 
been altered by editors till it can scarcely be called his. 
An allusion to his Rambler or his Idler is not readily ap- 
prehended in literary circles. The fame even of Rasselas 
has grown somewhat dim. But though the celebrity of the 
writings may have declined, the celebrity of the writer, 
strange to say, is as great as ever. Boswell's book has 
done for him more than the best of his own books could do. 
The memory of other authors is kept alive by their works. 
But the memory of Johnson keeps many of his works alive. 
The old philosopher is still among us in the brown coat with 
the metal buttons and the shirt which ought to be at wash, 
blinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming with his fingers, 
tearing his meat like a tiger, and swallowing his tea in 
oceans. No human being who has been more than seventy 
years in the grave is so w r ell-known to us. And it is but just 
to say that our intimate acquaintance with what he would 
himself have called the anfractuosities of his intellect and of 
his temper, serves only to strengthen our conviction that he 
was both a great and a good man. 

31 



SIR HUMPHRY DAVY, 



Sir Humphry Davy was born at Penzance on the 
17th of December, 1778. His was an ardent boyhood. 
Educated in a manner somewhat irregular, and with only 
the ordinary advantages of a remote country town, his 
talents appeared in the earnestness with which he cultivated 
at once the most various branches of knowledge and specu- 
lation. He was fond of metaphysics; he was fond of ex- 
periment ; he was an ardent student of nature ; and he 
possessed at an early age poetic powers, which, had they 
been cultivated, would in the opinion of competent judges, 
have made him as eminent in literature as he was m science. 
All these tastes endured throughout life. Business could 
not stifle them, — even the approach of deatli was unable to 
extinguish them. The reveries of his boyhood on the 
worn cliffs of Mount's Bay, may yet be traced in many ot' 
the pages dictated during the last year of his life amidst the 
ruins of the Coliseum. But the physical sciences — those 
more emphatically called at that time chemical — speedily 
attracted and absorbed his most earnest attention. The 
philosophy of the imponderables — of Light, Heat, and 
Electricity — was the subject of his earliest, and also that of 
his happiest essays. He was a very able chemist in the 
Strictest Bense of the word, although hi- ardor and his Ra- 
pidity of generalizing might seem to unlit him, in some 
(302) 



SIR HUMPHRY DAVY. . 363 

measure, for a pursuit which requires such intense watch- 
fulness with regard to minutiae, such patient weighing of 
fractions of a grain, such frequent though easy calculations. 
To Cavendish and Dalton, his great contemporaries — to 
whom we may now add Wollaston — these things were a 
pleasure in themselves ; to Davy they must ever have been 
irksome indispensables to the discovery of truth. But, in 
fact, Davy's discoveries were almost independent of such 
quantitative details ; numerical relations, and harmony of pro- 
portion, did\tot affect his mind with pleasure, which possibly 
was one reason of his deficient appreciation of works of art, 
the more remarkable from his poetic temperament. Dalton's 
doctrine of atomic combinations was slowly and doubtfully 
received by him, whilst Wollaston perceived its truth in- 
stantaneously. A keener relish for such relations might 
most naturally have led Davy to an anticipation of Mr. 
Faraday's notable discovery of the definite character of elec- 
trical decomposition, and the coincidence of the Electro- 
chemical proportions for different bodies with their atomic 
weights. 

The early papers of Davy refer chiefly to Heat, Light, 
and Electricity. He was, in fact, a physicist, more than a 
chemist. Whilst yet a surgeon's apprentice at Penzance, 
he satisfied himself of the immateriality of heat, which he 
illustrated by some ingenious experiments, in which, con- 
curring unawares with the conclusions of his future patron 
Rumford, he laid one foundation of his promotion. Re- 
moved to a sphere of really scientific activity at Clifton, 
under Dr. Beddoes, 1 he executed those striking researches in 
pneumatic chemistry and the physiological effects of breathing 
various gases, which gave him his first reputation ; re- 



1 Davy hit off his principal's character in a single sentence, — 
" Beddoes had talents which would have exalted him to the pinnacle 
of philosophical eminence, if they had been applied with discretion." 



364 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

searches so arduous and full of risk as to require a chemist 
in the vigor of life, and urged by an unextinguishable thirst 
for discovery, to undertake them. Even his brilliant dis- 
covery of the effects of inhaling nitrous oxide brought no 
competitor into the field ; and the use of anaesthetics, which 
might naturally have followed — the greatest discovery (if 
we except, perhaps, that of vaccination) for the relief of 
suffering humanity made in any age — was delayed for 
another generation. But so it was in all his triumphs, lie 
never seemed to drain the cup of discovery. lie quaffed 
only its freshest part. He felt the impulse of an unlimited 
command of resources. He carried on rapidly, and seem- 
ingly without order, several investigations at once. As in 
conversation he is described as seeming to know what one 
was going to say before uttering it, — he had the art of di- 
vining things complex and obscure. Seizing on results, he 
left to others the not inconsiderable merit, as well as labor, 
of pursuing the details. Keenly alive as he was to the 
value of fame, and the applause which his talents soon ob- 
tained for him, he left enough of both for his friends ; his 
contemporaries, as well as his successors, were enabled to 
weave a chaplet from the laurels which he had not stooped 
to gather. 

These remarks apply quite as strongly to his discoveries 
in the laws and facts of electro-chemical decomposition — 
those on which his fame most securely rests. Promoted in 
.1801 to a situation in the Laboratory of the Royal Institu- 
tion in London, he attached himself to the study of galvan- 
ism in the interval of the other and more purely chemical 
pursuits which the duties of his situation required. lie 
had already, at Clifton, made experiments with the pile of 
Yolta, and taken part in tin 4 discussion of its theory and 
effects, then (as we have seen) so actively carried on in 

Britain. In his papers of that period we find not only 

excellent experiments, but happy and just reasoning. The 



SIR HUMPHRY DAVY. 365 

chemical theory of the pile — namely, that the electrical 
effects observed by Galvani and Volta are due solely or 
chiefly to the chemical action of the fluid element on the 
metals — was more strongly embraced by him then than 
afterwards. In November, 1800, he concluded that " the pile 
of Volta acts only when the conducting substance between 
the plates is capable of oxidating the zinc ; and that in pro- 
portion as a greater quantity of oxygen enters into combi- 
nation with the zinc in a given time, so in proportion is the 
power of the pile to decompose water and to give the shock 
greater." He concludes that "the chemical changes con- 
nected with " oxidation " are somehow the cause of the elec- 
trical effect it produces." 1 His views on this subject under- 
went some modification afterwards. In his Elements of 
Chemical Philosophy, published twelve years later, we find 
the following statement of his opinions on the subject: — 
" Electrical effects are exhibited by the same bodies acting 
as masses, which produce chemical phenomena when acting 
by their particles ; it is, therefore, not improbable that the 
primary cause of both may be the same." A little further 
on he adds : — " They," speaking of electrical and chemical 
energies, " are conceived to be distinct phenomena, but pro- 
duced by the same -power acting in the one case on masses, 
in the other on particles." 2 

In 1804, Berzelius had published in conjunction with 
Hisinger, a paper on Electro-chemical Decompositions, in 
which he insisted on the general fact, that alkalies, earths, 

1 Works, ii., 162. 

2 Works, iv., 119. In his Bakerian lecture (1806) he had said, "In 
the present state of our knowledge, it would be useless to attempt to 
speculate on the remote cause of the electrical energy, or the reason 
why different bodies, after being brought into contact, should be 
found differently electrified ; its relation to chemical affinity is, how- 
evei - , sufficiently evident. May it not be identical with it; and ah 
essential property of matter 1" — Works, vol. v., p. 39. 

31 *. 



5*66 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

and combustible bodies seem to be attracted to the negative 
pole, and oxygen and acids to the positive. He also showed 
that the subdivision of bodies thus obtained was only a rela- 
tive not an absolute one ; for the same body may act as a 
base to a second, and as an acid to a third. But we must 
observe that results almost similar were contained in the 
early papers of Davy, and that Berzelius did not carry out 
his own principle so far as to lead to any striking discovery 
between 1803 (when his experiments were made) and 1806, 
(the date of Davy's first Bakerian lecture,) during which 
time the science of Galvanism or Voltaism made little real 
progress. The numerous experimenters engaged with it 
were baffled by the anomalous chemical results obtained, 
and by the appearance of decompositions under circum- 
stances w r holly unexpected, such as appeared to threaten the 
existence of some of the best established chemical truths. 
The chemical theory of the pile, at first so plausible, pre- 
sented new difficulties, and Berzelius having for a while 
defended it, returned to the simple contact theory of Volta, 
It was then that Davy seriously addressed himself to the 
subject, resolved to trace to their source every chemical 
anomaly ; and this he effected in a masterly manner, in hi3 
Bakerian lecture read before the Royal Society in 1806. In 
it he traces the unaccountable results of his predecessors to 
impurities in the materials used by them, or to those of the 
vessels in which the decompositions were made ; and he 
brings into a far distincter light than his predecessors had 
done, the power of the galvanic circuit to suspend or re- 
verse the action of even powerful chemical affinity ; "differ- 
ent bodies naturally possessed of chemical atlinities ap- 
pearing incapable of combining or remaining in combina- 
tion when placed in a state of electricity different from their 
natural order." We here see the fundamental doctrine of 
the electro-chemical theory, thai all bodies possess a place in 
the great scale of natural electrical relations to one another; 



SIR HUMPHRY DAVY. 367 

that chemical relations are intimately connected with this elec- 
tric state, and are suspended or reversed by its alteration. 
In the interpretation of those striking experiments, in 
which he caused acids to pass to the positive pole of the 
battery through the midst of alkaline solutions, and the con- 
verse, we find so close an approach to the theory of polar 
decomposition as enforced by the discoveries and reasonings 
of Mr. Faraday, that it seems impossible to deny to Davy 
the merit of having first perceived these curious relations. 
" It is very natural," he says, " to suppose that the repellant 
and attractive energies are communicated from one -particle 
to another particle of the same kind so as to establish a 
conducting chain in the fluid, and that the locomotion takes 
place in consequence ; " and presently adds, " there may 
possibly be a succession of decompositions and recomposi- 
tions throughout the fluid. 1 He likewise shows (p. 21) that 
the decomposing power does not reside in the wire or pole, 
but may be extended indefinitely through a fluid medium 
capable of conducting electricity. Mr. Faraday's experi- 
ments, which led him to discard the term pole, lead to the 
same conclusion, and are of the same character. A few 
pages further on in this same Bakerian lecture, Davy 
observes (p. 42), that, " allowing that combination depends 
on a balance of the natural electrical energies of bodies, 
it is" easy to conceive that a measure may be found of the 
artificial energies as to intensity and quantity capable of 
destroying this equilibrium ; and such a measure would 
enable us to make a scale of electrical powers corresponding 
to degrees of affinity." Here we see the acute presentiment 
of the beautiful discovery of the definiteness of electrical de- 
compositions ; as in the concluding portion of the same remark- 
able paper we find a clear anticipation of natural electrical 
currents to be discovered in mineral, and especially metalif- 

i Of the Bakerian Lecture, in his collected Works, p. 29. 



368 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

erous deposits, since established by Mr. R. W. Fox, and of 
the agency of feeble electric energies, long continued, in 
effecting geological changes, and in producing insoluble 
combinations of earths and metals, so ingeniously confirmed 
by the beautiful and direct experiments of Becquerel. 

The sequel to this remarkable paper, read to the Royal 
Society in November, 1807, contained the splendid appli- 
cation of the principle and methods which it described, 
to the decomposition of the alkalies and to the discovery of 
their singular bases, — substances possessing the lustre 
and malleability of metals, yet so light as to float upon 
water, and having the extraordinary property of becoming 
inflamed in contact with ice. Potassium was discovered in 
the Laboratory of the Royal Institution on the Gth October, 
1807, and sodium a few days later. The battery used con- 
tained 250 pairs of plates of six and four inches square. 
Such success was fitted to charm a disposition like that of 
Davy, and more than reward him for all his toils. To have 
discovered two new bodies, and opened an entirely new lield 
of wide chemical research, would itself have been enough. 
But the extraordinary properties of the new bases were 
such as seemed to correspond to the lively imagination of 
the chemist who produced them, and to transport him to an 
Aladdin's palace more brilliant than ever his fertile im- 
agination had ever conceived. Yet it is pleasing to remem- 
ber that these popular discoveries followed, at the interval 
of a year, the patient and able researches which led him to 
them, and which had already been rewarded, at a period of 
the bitterest international hostilities by the scientific prize oi' 
8,000 francs, founded l>v the Emperor Napoleon. 1 

The genius displayed in these, Davy's most celebrated 

1 Such me the national feeling at this time in England, that worthy 
people were Pound who considered Davy as almost a traitor, when ho 
accepted the French prise. Bee Southey*a Lit',. 



SIR HUMPHRY DAVY. 369 

researches, is evident on a careful perusal of his papers ; 
but still more from a consideration of the state of science 
at the time, and of the willing tribute to his merits paid by 
the ablest of his contemporaries. Few persons of the 
present day will venture to controvert the assertion of his 
acute contemporary, Dr. Thomas Young (than whom no 
man was ever a less indiscriminate eulogist), that Davy's 
researches were " more splendidly successful than any which 
have ever before illustrated the physical sciences, in any of 
their departments ;" and that the contents of the Bakerian 
Lectures, in particular, " are as much superior to those of 
Newton's Optics, as the Principia are superior to these or 
any other human work." * A not less impartial tribute to 
his superlative genius has been yielded by M. Dumas, who, 
if I mistake not, has described Davy as being the ablest 
and most successful chemist who ever lived. A similar 
homage is paid to him by the sagacious Cuvier. 

It is not within our scope to consider minutely Davy's 
purely chemical discoveries and experiments, though they 
were numerous and important, independently of those made 
with the aid of electricity. His proofs of the elementary 
nature of chlorine and iodine were amongst the most con- 
siderable in their results. But as a mere analyst, Davy 
had neither the leisure nor the taste for continuous plodding 
labor, and he therefore naturally made mistakes in chemical 
details. His Elements of Chemical Philosophy remained, 
in consequence, a fragment of an extensive work. His 
contemporary, Berzelius, following his steps in electro-chem- 
ical discovery, attained far greater address, and became an 
author of high and merited reputation, whilst his school 
surpassed all others in Europe in producing accomplished 
analysts. 2 

1 Quarterly Review, No. 15. 

2 Jons Jacob Berzelius, the greatest analytical chemist of his day, 
was bora in East Gothland, in the same year with Davy, and died in 



370 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

The years immediately following the publication of his 
Bakerian Lectures were passed by Davy in the unenvied 
possession of the highest fame, and in the tranquil further- 
ance of his first and greatest discoveries. His lectures at 
the Royal Institution continued to be one of the most 
fashionable resorts in London, and he was freely admitted 
in return into the most aristocratic society ; he had but to 
express a wish, and a voltaic battery of no less than 2,000 
pairs, containing 128,000 square inches of surface, was con- 
structed for his use, by means of a liberal subscription. 
His health, when seriously compromised by the severity of 
his labors, was a matter of public concern, and its variations 
were announced by frequent bulletins. The copyright of 
his lectures on agriculture was sold for a price unexampled 
perhaps before or since for such a work. In 1812, he was 
knighted by the Prince Regent, and soon after he married 
a lady of fortune and accomplishments. His duties at the 
Royal Institution became thenceforth honorary. He had in 
a space of ten years attained the pinnacle of scientific repu- 
tation, and he was for the time truly happy — unenvious of 
others — deeply attached to his relatives — generous of his 
resources — unwearied in his philosophic labors. A certain 
change (it must with regret be owned) came over his state 
of mind, tarnished his serenity, and gradually, though im- 
perceptibly, weakened his scientific zeal. It was to be 
ascribed solely, we believe, to the severe ordeal of exuber- 
ant but heartless popularity which he underwent in London* 
The flatteries of fashionable life acting on a young, ardent, 
and most susceptible mind, mingling first with the graver 
applause of his philosophic compeers, and at length, by their 
reiteration and seductions quite overpowering it. by degrees 

1848, when lie had almost completed his 69th year. lie contributed, 
in a signal manner, to the establishment of Dafton's principle of de- 
iinitc chemical equivalents ; but he made no Bingle discovery of com- 
manding i m po rta nce. 



SIR HUMPHRY DAVY. 871 

attached Davy to the fashionable world, and loosened his 
ties to that laboratory which had once been to him the sole 
and fit scene of his triumphs. Had he been blessed with a 
family his course would have been evener and happier. 
Let us not severely criticize, where we still find so much to 
admire and imitate. But we record the fact, for the conso- 
lation of those who, beginning the pursuit of science, as 
Davy did, in a humble sphere, and with pure ardor, may 
fancy that they are worthy of pity, if they do not attain with 
him the honors of wealth and title, and the homage, grateful 
to talent, of rank, wit, and beauty. 

A research, second perhaps only to his electro-chemical 
discoveries, remains to be noticed, as the chief fruit of the 
third period of his life, on which we now enter, the first 
being his early career before settling in London ; the second 
that passed in the Royal Institution. 

The subject was, the laws of combustion, and the happy 
invention of the safety-lamp. Though intimately connected 
with the doctrine of simple heat, it may, most properly, from 
its chemical character, and from its connection with Davy's 
history, be considered briefly here. The lamentable loss of 
life occurring in coal-mines from explosions of fire-damp or 
inflammable air disengaged from the workings, had for many 
years attracted the attention and sympathy of the public, 
and had likewise been carefully considered by scientific men. 
The explosive gas was known to be the light carburetted 
hydrogen. Two plans alone seemed to present themselves 
for diminishing the danger : — the one to remove, or chemi- 
cally to decompose the fire-damp altogether ; the other to 
provide a miner's lamp which, by its construction, should be 
incapable of causing explosion. The former of these modes 
of protection, it was soon seen, could only be palliative ; the 
only efficient form which it took, was that of a more effectual 
ventilation ; but the terrific rapidity with which a mine may 
be suddenly pervaded by fire-damp, from channels opened 



372 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

by a single pick-axe, must prevent it from ever acting as a 
cure. The latter plan had as yet yielded nothing more ef- 
fectual than the steel mill long used by miners, which pro- 
duced an uncertain and intermitting light, by the rotation of 
a steel wheel against a flint, the scintillations of which were 
incapable of inflaming the fire-damp. The insufficiency of 
the light prevented it from being used, except in circum- 
stances of known danger. The celebrated Baron Humboldt, 
Dr. Clanny, and several others, had invented safety-lamps 
on different principles ; but they were all clumsy and more 
or less ineffectual. 1 

At last, in the summer of 1815, the Rev. Dr. Gray 
afterwards Bishop of Bristol, then chairman of a com- 
mittee appointed by a benevolent association at Bishop 
Wearmouth for the prevention of colliery accidents, applied 
to Davy, who was then on a sporting tour in Scotland, re- 
questing his advice and assistance. Sir Humphry answered 
the call with promptitude. On his southward journey, in 
the latter part of August, he visited the collieries, ascer- 
tained the circumstances of the danger which he had to 
meet, and was provided by Mr. Buddie with specimens of 
the inflammable air for examination. Within a fortnight 
after his return to London, he had ascertained new and im- 
portant qualities of the substance, and had already four 
schemes on hand for the prevention of accident. Before the 
end of October he had arrived at the following principles of 
operation in connection witli the safety-lamp. " First, a cer- 
tain mixture of azote and carbonic aeid prevents tin 1 explo- 
sion of the fire-damp, and this mixture is necessarily formed 
in the safe-lantern. Secondly, the fire-damp will not tXflod* 
in tubes or feeders of a certain small diameter. The ingress 



1 I hays spoken iii art. 393 [of the Dissertation] of tin- independent 
and ingenious efforts of George Stephenson towards the invention of 
ft safety-lamp contemporaneously with those of Paw. 



SIR HUMPHRY DAVY. 373 

to, and egress of air from my lantern," he adds, " is through 
such tubes or feeders ; and, therefore, when any explosion 
is artificially made in the safe-lantern, it does not communi- 
cate to the external air." The effect of narrow tubes in 
intercepting the passage of flame, is due to the coolino- 
effect of their metallic sides upon the combustible gases of 
which flame is composed ; 1 and one of his first and most 
important observations was the fortunate peculiarity that 
fire-damp, even when mixed with the amount of air most 
favorable to combustion, (one part of gas to seven or eight 
of air,) requires an unusually high temperature to induce 
combustion. Olefiant gas, carbonic oxide, and sulphuretted 
hydrogen, are all inflamed by iron at a red heat, or ignited 
charcoal, but carburetted hydrogen does not take fire under 
a perfect white heat. The earliest safety-lamp consisted of 
a lantern with horn or glass sides, in which a current of air 
to supply the flame was admitted below by numerous tubes 
of small diameter, or by narrow interstices between concen- 
tric tubes of some length ; or, finally, by rows of parallel 
partitions of metal, forming rectangular canals extremely 
narrow in proportion to their length. A similar system of 
escape apertures was applied at the top of the lantern. 

With characteristic ingenuity, Davy did not stop here. 
He continued to reduce at once the apertures and length of 
his metallic guards, until it occurred to him that wire gauze 
might, with equal effect and far more convenience, act upon 
the temperature of flame, so as to reduce it below the point 
of ignition, and thus effectually stop its communication* 
The experiment was successful, and by the 9th of Novem- 
ber, 1815, or within about ten weeks after his first experi- 
ments, an account of the safety-lamp defended by wire 



1 This fact had been ascertained some years previously, by Mr. 
Tennant and Dr. Wollaston, but it remained unpublished, and was 
not applied by them to the prevention of colliery explosions. 
32 



374 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

gauze was presented to the Royal Society. About two 
months later he produced a lamp entirely enveloped in me- 
tallic tissue. 

There are none of Davy's researches which will stand 
a closer scrutiny than those which terminated thus success- 
fully. No fortuitous observation led him to conceive a 
happy idea and apply it to practice. A great boon to hu- 
manity and the arts was required at his hands; and with- 
out a moment's delay, he proceeded to seek for it under the 
guidance of a strictly experimental and inductive philoso- 
phy. Without, perhaps, a single false turn, and scarcely a 
superfluous experiment, he proceeded straight to his goal, 
guided by the promptings of a happy genius aided by no 
common industry. The chemical, the mechanical, and the 
purely physical parts of the problem were all in turn dealt 
with, and with equal sagacity. It may safely be affirmed 
that he who was destitute of any one of these qualifications 
must have failed in obtaining the object so ardently desired, 
unless by the aid of some rare good fortune. We have it 
on Davy's own authority, that none of his discoveries gave 
him so much pleasure as this one. His whole character 
possessed in it much of a sympathizing and generous hu- 
manity ; his ideas of the dignity of science were from the 
first, as his researches in Dr. Beddoes' laboratory showed, 
intimately connected with the aim of advancing the welfare, 
and of diminishing the misfortunes of mankind : the rapid- 
ity and singular success of his investigation in the ease of 
the safety-lamp, kept his ardent soul all alive, and afforded 
him the triumph of a Eureka at its completion. To these 
sources of inward gratification was added the unstinted 
meed of praise bestowed on him by his contemporaries, 
Playfair, "the true and amiable philosopher," as Davy long 
before described him, thus proclaimed his victory in the 
Edinburgh Review \ — After describing the course of a dis- 
covery " which is in DO degree the effect of accident," he 



SIR HUxMPHRY DAVY. 375 

adds, " this is exactly such a case as we should choose to 
place before Bacon, were he to revisit the earth, in order to 
give him, in a small compass, an idea of the advancement 
which philosophy has made since the time when he had 
pointed out to her the route which she ought to pursue. 
The result is as wonderful as it is important. An invisible 
and impalpable barrier made effectual against a force 
the most violent and irresistible in its operations ; and 
a power that in its tremendous effects seemed to emulate th© 
lightning and the earthquake, confined within a narrow 
space, and shut up in a net of the most slender texture, — 
are facts which must excite a degree of wonder and aston- 
ishment, from which neither ignorance nor wisdom can de- 
fend the beholder." 

For this truly patriotic labor, the only national testimony 
which Davy received was the inadequate one of a baronetcy 
which was conferred on him by the Prince Regent in 1818 ; 
but his real triumph and great reward were in the enthusi- 
astic appreciation of his entire success by those on whom he 
had disinterestedly conferred so great a benefit. A testi- 
monial, in the form of a service of plate, of great value, 
was presented to him by the coal-owners of the north of 
England. 

Davy's researches on flame were intimately connected 
with his electrical and chemical discoveries. He remodelled 
Lavoisier's theory of combustion, and put an end to the dis- 
tinction between combustibles and supporters of combustion. 
Chemical combination, effected with great energy, and ac- 
companied by a high temperature, is essential to combustion, 
and either element of the combination is equally entitled 
to the denomination of combustible. Guided by the electro- 
chemical theory, Davy appears to have thought that the 
heat of flame has an electrical origin. 

But I must hasten to close this section. Among the 
labors of his latter years, there was none which interested 



376 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

Davy more, or which reasonably promised more useful re- 
sults, than his plan for protecting the copper sheathing of 
ships from the corrosive action of sea-water, by affixing 
plates of zinc or iron, which should render the copper 
slightly electro-negative, and thus indispose it for combining 
with acid principles. It is a somewhat singular fact, that 
Fabbroni, about thirty years before, had instanced the cor- 
rosion of copper sheathing near the contact of heterogene- 
ous metals, as an instance of the chemical origin of galvan- 
ism. 1 Davy's experiments were conducted with his usual 
skill and success, and the remedy only failed of general 
adoption on account, it may be said, of being too effectual, 
other and opposite injurious effects having been found to 
arise. 

Davy was elected President of the Royal Society in 
1820, in the room of Sir Joseph Banks, who had held the 
office for forty-two years. It was a distinguished compli- 
ment, for the election was all but unanimous. He continued 
to communicate papers for several years subsequently ; but 
his energy, his temper, and, finally, his health began to give 
way, showing that the ardent labors of his youth and prime 
had injured his constitution. Attacked with paralysis in 
1827, he spent his last years chiefly abroad, and died at 
Geneva (where he was buried), on the 29th May. 1829. 

The character of Davy was a rare and admirable com- 
bination. The ardor of his researches, and the deep devo- 
tion of his whole being to scientific investigation, have been 
already proved. They had the effect of completely annihi- 
lating every baser passion. He valued property only in so 
for as he could apply it usefully; and his disinterestedness 
with respect to the fortunes which several of his practical 
discoveries might have honorably earned, was one of the 

1 There appears, however, to have been something erroneons in the 

details of Fahhroni's observations, or at least in the account of them 
given in Xicholson's Journal, 



SIR HUMPHRY DAVY. 377 

most striking parts of his character. His fancy was dis- 
cursive to a degree rarely met with in men of science. He 
continued to write poetry nearly all his life, and the tone of 
it was that of grave speculation, always reverting to the 
destiny of man and the beneficence of the Creator. His 
lectures were composed with care ; and their effect, even as 
pieces of oratory, was striking. Coleridge frequented them 
" to increase his stock of metaphors ; " yet they were always 
to the point, and never degenerated into rhetorical display. 
For a man of such extraordinary liveliness of fancy and 
impetuosity of action, his mistakes were astonishingly few. 
After his very first experience, his publications were made 
with great care and judgment. His estimates of his con- 
temporaries appear generally to have been fair and liberal, 
though it would be incorrect to affirm that he was univer- 
sally popular among them. The combination of isolated 
and intense occupation in his laboratory, with excitement in 
the mixed society of an admiring London public, was a trial 
which few, if any, could have escaped better than he did ; 
and so far as we can judge of a man from his expressed 
opinion of his own successes, whether recorded in his works 
or in his intimate correspondence, Davy must be accounted 
to have acquitted himself gracefully and well. He always 
spoke of the Pile of Volta as the first source of his own 
success. " Nothing tends so much to the advancement of 
knowledge as the application of a new instrument," he 
says ; and then adds, " The native intellectual powers of 
men in different times are not so much the causes of the 
different success of their labors, as the peculiar nature of 
the means and artificial resources in their possession ; " a 
proposition which he applies to his own discoveries. But we 
may truly say with one of his biographers, that to him 
" the Voltaic apparatus was the golden branch by which he 
subdued the spirits that had opposed the advance of previ- 
ous philosophers ; but what would its possession have 
32* 



378 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

availed him had not his genius, like the ancient sibyls, 
pointed out its use and application ? " 

The last, and not least, extraordinary characteristic of 
Davy to which I shall now advert, was the highly practical 
turn of a mind which seemed formed in a speculative mould. 
Four at least of his chief researches were of this kind — 
his experiments in breathing the gases ; his lectures on agri- 
cultural chemistry ; his invention of the safety -lamp ; and 
his protectors for ships. No man, whose path so clearly lay 
in original discovery, ever left so many valuable legacies to 
art and to his country. 



DAVID HUME 



David Hume, one of the most celebrated historians and 
philosophers of Great Britain, has already been twice no- 
ticed in the Preliminary Dissertations* where the principal 
doctrines of his metaphysics have been considered by 
Stewart, and those of his ethics by Mackintosh. This, hap- 
pily, exempts the writer of the present article from touching 
on the same topics, except incidentally. But as the life and 
character of other celebrated men, no less prominent in the 
Dissertations, have been formally treated in the body of this 
work, it seemed due to the memory of Hume to give his 
biography a little more fully than in the few paragraphs 
dedicated to him in the previous editions ; and the following 
sketch has therefore been inserted. It will be restricted to 
a brief account of his life and genius, an estimate of his 
merits as a writer, and probably a glance at one or two of 
such of his philosophical opinions as were too remote from 
the design of either Dissertation to challenge notice there, 
but yet may seem of sufficient importance to be referred to. 

Hume has left us a very short autobiographic sketch of 
his own life ; it is too scanty, too bare of details, to inspire 
the interest which belongs to some similar memoirs, — that 
of Gibbon for example. But though it is little more than a 
catalogue of dates and facts, the author offers a good apology 

1 To the Encyclopaedia Britannica. 

J (379) 



380 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

for his conciseness : " It is difficult," he says, " for a man to 
speak long of himself without vanity." He assures the 
reader that the notice shall contain little more than the his- 
tory of his writings, and he has kept his word. From all 
danger of vanity in treating such topics — however delicate 
for an author — he flattered himself he had security in his 
early failures : " The first success of my writings," says 
he, " was not such as to be an object of vanity." Yet the 
acerbity with which at that so distant day he remembers 
and records the slow steps by which he had emerged from 
obscurity into fame, and which all that fame had not been 
able to soothe, would seem to indicate that the philosopher 
had not quite so effectually mortified his vanity as he im- 
agined. The tardy homage which the public paid to his 
merits is a theme to which he never tired of recurring, 
though, as will be seen in the sequel, not very reasonably. 1 

He was born at Edinburgh, April 26, 1711. His father 
was a scion of the house of the Earl of Home, or Hume, as 
the name was often spelt, and as our philosopher, in oppo- 
sition to his brother's orthographic heterodoxy, always per- 
sisted in spelling it. His mother was daughter of Sir 
David Falconer, president of the College of Justice. His 
father died when he was a child ; his mother, of whom he 
speaks in the fondest terms, was long spared to him, and well 
deserved the tribute of affection he pays her. u Though 
young and handsome, she devoted herself entirely to the 
rearing and education of her children." At the age of 
fifteen he was sent to the University of Edinburgh, and he 
tells us, what none will doubt, that he passed through the 

1 " Every new edition was only an acknowledgment of the injustice 
which had' been done him, and a poor instalment of his just dues. . . . 
Hume at last wore out the patience of his very publisher/' [Ed. /ur. 
Jan. 1847). "As to the approbation or esteem of those blockheads 

who call themselves the public," thus he writes (1707) "and whom a 
bookseller, a lord, a priest, or a party can guide, 1 do most heartily 
despise it." 



DAVID HUME. 381 

usual " course of education with success ; " though his read- 
ing was marked at that time — and as regards the classics, 
was always marked — rather by extent than by accurate 
scholarship. Even at that early age he was possessed with 
an intense love of literature, and by that ambition of literary 
distinction which was the ruling passion, not to say the only 
passion, of his life. Seldom, if ever, has the propensity to 
a studious life developed itself so early or so exclusively, or 
asserted its claims so imperiously. From the very first, and 
all along, it overmastered every thing in the shape of pleas- 
ure or interest that could be brought into competition with it. 
As a younger brother, and a younger brother of no opu- 
lent house, he was, of course, to carve out his own fortunes 
in the world. " My patrimony," he says, " after the manner 
of my country, was but slender ; " yet no lures, no exigen- 
cies could induce him to seek fortune at the expense of 
literature. In this case, the phlegm of the young philos- 
opher seemed, in its way, as immovable as the enthusiasm 
of a young poet frequently proves; he could not, as the 
world would say, calculate consequences. To add to the 
wonder, Hume was most creditably anxious of independ- 
ence, and resolved, at whatever costs of economy, to pos- 
sess it. Nay, as his after-life showed, our philosopher was 
by no means insensible to the advantages of wealth ; never- 
theless, he was unwilling to adopt any course to attain 
riches at the expense of those literary pursuits which must 
more frequently conduct to penury. Thus all the schemes 
his friends formed on his behalf were frustrated by this one 
passion. His " studious habits, sobriety, and industry, led 
them to wish that he should devote himself to the law," in 
which surely these qualities, in conjunction with his surpassing 
acuteness and subtilty, might have easily won distinction; 
but while " they fancied he was poring over Voet and 
Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors he was se- 



382 . NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

cretly devouring." An experiment in mercantile life was 
equally unsuccessful. In 1734, he went to Bristol with 
introductions to " eminent merchants " in that city, but he 
found this "scene utterly unsuitable." He then exiled 
himself to France ; and first at Rheims, then at La Fleche, 
devoted himself in studious solitude, to literature and phi- 
losophy. During this time he made a " rigid frugality 
supply the deficiencies of fortune " — a course to which he 
resolutely adhered till the dawn of better days ; and with 
singular decision of character, and obedience to the ruling 
passion, " regarded every object as contemptible except the 
improvement of his talents for literature." In this interval 
he meditated and composed his Treatise of Hitman Nature. 
This work was completed by his twenty-fifth year, and, as 
the production of so young a mind, must certainly be re- 
garded as a prodigy of metaphysical acuteness. Indeed, 
there is reason to believe that the results of his speculation 
(if scepticism allow the term) must have been arrived at 
long before, even from his boyish days. In the account he 
gives of himself in that remarkable letter, first published by 
Mr. Burton, (x.o\. i., pp. 31-39,) in which he anonymously 
consults a physician in relation to some singular but very 
prolonged hypochondriacal affection, (itself, probably, both 
symptom and effect of an overwrought mind.) he discloses a 
style of thought and points to a method of speculation which 
strongly remind us of the conditions of mind under which 
Descartes commenced philosopher. Were there any proofs 
(as there are certainly none) of his acquaintance with Des- 
cartes' writings at this early age, it would have seemed 
almost certain that his method of philosophizing was sheer 
imitation; on the other hand, if this letter had been written 
after his residence at La Fleche, where Descartes felt so 
similarly, the same conclusion would have been inevitable. 
From this letter, as a clue to much in the character of his 



DAVID HUME. 383 

mind and its after history, and of its tendencies to morbid 
speculation at a very early date, we shall presently give 
some extracts. 

In 1737, Hume came to London with his Treatise on 
Human Nature, and in the next year published it. " Never 
literary attempt," he says, " was more unfortunate ; it fell 
dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction 
as even to exite a murmur." He declares, however, that 
being naturally of a cheerful temper, he soon recovered 
from this and similar subsequent disappointments. Yet it is 
clear, from the details in Burton's Life, that the equanimity 
of our philosopher was sorely tried ; that he had, with the 
exaggeration natural in a young author, been expecting that 
the world would have little to do for a time, except to read 
his lucubrations ! He tells his friend Ramsay, that " he 
would not aim at any thing until he could judge of his 
success in his grand undertaking, and see upon what footing 
he was to stand in the world ; " and as the day of publica- 
tion drew near, confesses to being perturbed at " the near- 
ness of the great event." Yet it is certain that he bore the 
disappointment of his hopes on this occasion much better 
than he did some far lighter failures of the same kind. 
Cheerful as might be his temper, buoyant as were his hopes, 
his mortifications of this sort, and especially that which 
befell him when he published the first volume of his History, 
were keenly felt and remembered, and engendered prejudices 
against the " Public," which little became a philosopher, and 
utterly prevented him from doing the said " Public " justice. 
Properly speaking he never forgave its early neglect, and 
could not see that he had not been a very ill-used man, even 
when fame and competency had rewarded his at first un- 
promising labors. In the case of the Treatise of Human 
Nature, however, he himself admits, that in fact the public 
was in the right ; which, indeed, any one would naturally 
expect, seeing that the philosopher was but five-and-twenty, 



384 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

and his philosophy the product of that mature age ! That 
he was not insensible that his failure in the first instance 
was more attributable to himself than to the world, is sig- 
nificantly shown by his acknowledgment of indiscretion in 
going to the press so early. " I had always," he says, " en- 
tertained a notion that my want of success in publishing the 
Treatise of Human Nature, had proceeded more from the 
manner than the matter" (equally from both, the public 
would say,) "and that I had been guilty of a very usual 
indiscretion in going to the press too early." He tells us, 
he " set about remedying its defects." He cast the first part 
of it entirely anew in the Enquiry concerning Human 
Understanding, published 1747 ; but this, he confesses, had 
little more success than the former. In fact, he was still but 
serving his apprenticeship to fame — which many a man, as 
great, has had to do for a much longer period. In 1742. he 
published the first part of his Essays. These, which were 
buoyed up by a large intermixture of more attractive topics 
than those of the Treatise, and were recommended by the 
fascinations of a far more finished style, met with a better 
reception, and they have since been always popular. The 
second edition, however, did not go off rapidly enough to 
satisfy the exacting temper of the author. After publishing 
the Treatise, he lived for some time with his brother in 
Scotland, still ardently pursuing his literary occupations. 
This mode of life was not very agreeably diversified by the 
temporary charge of the half mad, or at least wholly hyp- 
ochondriacal Earl of Anuandale (1745). Whether tutor 
or keeper be the more proper term for our philosopher 
during a year of very humiliating servitude, it seems hard 
to say. II is next post (1747) was that o^ secretary to 
General St. Clair, whom he accompanied in his military 
embassy to the courts of Vienna and Turin. He was intro- 
duced, lie tells OS, as aid-de-eamp to the general, and wore 
the uniform of an officer, — a droll transformation for our 



DAVID HUME. 385 

ungainly philosopher. Two years were thus spent, almost 
the only years of his life, he declares, in which he was 
" estranged from literature." Total estrangement can hardly 
be supposed, nor does one see any reason for it. If it were 
so, the military uniform in his case must have done more 
than even the active duties of a soldier's life could do in that 
of Gibbon, in whom the passion for literature was, however, 
still more ardent than in Hume. Gibbon's account, in his 
Journal, of the absolute possession which history had taken 
of him, of the enthusiasm with which he indulged dreams 
of literary ambition and pursued his studies even in his tent, 
affords a striking instance of the "ruling passion." But if 
Hume's occupations estranged him for a while from litera- 
ture, the emoluments of his office were not to be despised ; 
they so materially aided his very limited resources, that he 
sometimes pleasantly talked to his smiling friends of having 
achieved independent fortune : " I was now," says he, 
" master of near a thousand pounds ! " 

In 1749, he again repaired to his brother's house, where 
he took up his abode for two years. He spent his leisure in 
composing the second part of his essays, which he called 
Political Discourses, and his Enquiry concerning the Prin- 
ciples of Morals. His publisher now told him, that his writ- 
ings, " all but the unfortunate Treatise, were beginning to 
be asked for and talked about." " It was a hopeful symp- 
tom too," he tells us, " that answers by reverends and right 
reverends came out two or three in a year ; " and that he 
"found, by Dr. "VVarburton's railing, that the books were 
beginning to be esteemed in good company." 

In 1751, he removed from the country to Edinburgh, 
under the notion that the " capital was the true scene for a 
man of letters ; " and in the following year he published the 
Political Discourses; "the only work of mine," says he, 
" that was successful on the first publication." It is difficult 
to say what is the criterion of success in the estimate of un- 
33 



386 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

reasonable expectation ; but Hume was still a young writer, 
and he certainly had no reason to complain of the reception 
of the first part of his Essays. Conscious of power, he was 
too impatient for fame, and forgot that fame is a thing of 
slow growth ; he wished to see the oak rise immediately 
from the acorn. Meantime, grumble as he might, his sap- 
lings, in the estimate of any sober judge, would be thought 
to be doing well enough. 

In the same year he published in London, his Enquiry 
concerning the Principles of Morals, of which he hesitates 
not to say, that " of all his writings, philosophical, literary, 
or historical, it is incomparably the best." 

Hume wondered that Rousseau should prefer his Entile 
to his Heloise, and compares it to Milton's preference of his 
Paradise Regained to his Paradise Lost. Whether Hume 
himself be not another instance of a singular delusion, many 
readers will have their doubts. But much will depend on 
what is meant by " best." If Hume meant by " best," that 
the Enquiry was the most original and acute of his writings, 
that which displayed most power, posterity will hardly 
affirm his verdict ; if by " best," he meant, that of all his 
writings, it is most free from paradox and error, it will 
probably be granted. Sir James Mackintosh has observed, 
that " it is creditable to him that he deliberately preferred 
the treatise which is least tainted with paradox, though the 
least original of all his writings." Sir James contends, how- 
ever, for its preeminent excellence of style. For a very 
able criticism of its merits and defects, the reader is referred 
to the second Dissertation. 

In 1752, Ilumo was appointed librarian to the Faculty 
of Advocates. The chief immediate value of the office* to 
which little or no emolument was attached, consisted in the 
access it afforded to a large library : indirectly it was of 
greater advantage, as this last circumstance encouraged, if it 
did not suggest, his writing the History of England. Ter- 



DAVID HUME. 387 

rifled, however, with the magnitude of the task, dreading, 
as he well might, to begin, after the orthodox manner, with 
the landing of Julius Caesar, he commenced with the acces- 
sion of the Stuarts, " an epoch," he thought, " when the mis- 
representations began chiefly to take place ; " but which, let 
them be what they would, could hardly transcend his own. 
His anticipations of success were, as in former cases, san- 
guine, and he was doomed, for a while, to see the usual frus- 
tration of his hopes. " Miserable," says he, " was my dis- 
appointment ; I was assailed by one cry of reproach, disap- 
pointment, and even execration. English, Scotch, and Irish ; 
Whig and Tory, churchman and sectary, free-thinker and 
religionist, united in their rage against the one man who had 
presumed to shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles I. 
and the Earl of Strafford." Hume's indignation makes a 
droll mis-estimate of his own enormous delinquencies. If 
he had exercised common justice and impartiality, to say 
nothing of " generosity," in other eases, the few " generous 
tears " which the unwontedly sentimental skeptic could have 
managed to distil for Strafford or Charles, would never have 
given such mortal offence. It was yet more mortifying to 
the author, that the furious storm which greeted the first 
appearance of the work, subsided into a more vexatious 
calm ; for what man would not sooner be railed at than for- 
gotten? The History seemed doomed to oblivion. The 
publisher assured Hume, that " in a year he sold but forty- 
five copies." Hume himself confesses, that with two " odd 
exceptions," — the Primates of England and Ireland, — he 
scarcely heard of any man of rank or letters who " could 
endure the book ; " and that had it not been for the breaking 
out of the war with France (in spite of the " cheerful tem- 
per " with which he would have us believe his philosophy 
took such things 1 ), he would have sought an asylum there, 

1 On a subsequent occasion, when complaining of the tardiness of 
his political patrons, Hume repeated this sort of threat. — " The fum- 



388 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

and changing his name, for ever renounced his country ! 
As it was, his country was spared this dire infliction. Mean- 
time, Hume persevered, and his second volume which ap- 
peared two years afterwards had somewhat better success. 

In 1759, he published, according to the retrograde course 
in which he had commenced, the history of the House of 
Tudor, which also was received with a storm of disapproba- 
tion. But if we may trust his own averment, he was now 
" callous against the impression of public folly ; " and gave the 
early history in two more volumes in 1761, " with tolerable, 
and but tolerable success." 

But that his complaints of want of success were, on the 
whole, unreasonable, is evident from his own statement, 
namely, that in spite of all " public folly," " the copy-money 
given him by the booksellers much exceeded any thing for- 
merly known in England." In fact he had been, as usual, 
too impatient of success. But even when he had become, 
and in a large degree from his literary labors, "not only in- 
dependent, but opulent" according to his truly philosophi- 
cal scale of riches, — he never forgave the "public tolly " 
for not instantaneously recognizing his merits. 

Though his History had grievous defects, which he took 
care, in the indulgence of his prejudices (continually 
strengthening with opposition), to aggravate in every suc- 
cessive edition, it had also singular merits, and was secure 
of the popularity which the impatience of its author thought 
so tardy. It was nearly the first modern example of his- 
tory treated in a philosophical spirit, while the charms of 
its unrivalled style would alone have insured its BUCC 

ing incense," says the critic in the Ed. Review, (1S47.) " which the 
Parisians wore offering him as a sort of male Goddess of Kea-on, 
must have intoxicated him, or he never would have closed a letter 
with the formal notice, — 'I have been accustomed to meet with 
nothing hut insult- and indignities from my native country ; hut if it 
continue so, ' ingrota patria, ne &ssa guidon haoebis.' " 



DAVID HUME. 389 

Iii the interval between the first and second volumes of 
his History he published his Natural History of Religion ; 
of which he says the " public entry was obscure ; " its con- 
tents, acute as the treatise is, need not leave us in any won- 
der at that. For this neglect, however, he assures us he 
received consolation, in the shape of " a pamphlet by Dr. 
Hurd, written with all the illiberal petulance, arrogance, 
and scurrility, which distinguish the Warburtonian school." 
The consolation, from this mode of speaking of it, would 
not seem very soothing. 

Hume was now (1761) fifty years of age, and meditated 
a philosphical retreat in Edinburgh for the rest of his days ; 
but on receiving an invitation from Lord Hertford to attend 
him in his embassy to Paris, with the prospect of secretary- 
ship to the embassy, he, after some hesitation, consented. 
He was soon appointed secretary, and in 1765, when Lord 
Hertford was made lord-lieutenant of Ireland, was left at 
Paris as Charge d' Affairs till the new ambassador, the Duke 
of Richmond, arrived. In 1766, he returned to Edin- 
burgh, " not richer," he pleasantly says, " but with much 
more money" 

During his residence in Paris, he was not only welcome, 
he was the rage. In spite of his philosophical shyness, his 
destitution of all personal graces and charm of manner, and 
even in spite of his French — French which only French 
politeness could have heard without laughing — he was 
overwhelmed with the most flattering attentions of combined 
rank and genius, youth and beauty. " The more I resiled 
from these excessive civilities," says he, " the more I was 
loaded with them." It is evident, nevertheless, from many 
expressions, that this homage was not a little soothing to our 
philosopher's complacency, and often excited a flutter of 
vanity which his philosophy would hardly have approved ; 
and he would as certainly have been cured of it, had he 
been duly conscious of the ridiculous position in which his 
83* 



390 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

worshippers often placed him. " From what has already 
been said of him," says Lord Charlemont, " it is apparent 
that his conversation to strangers, and particularly to 
Frenchmen, could be little delightful, and still more par- 
ticularly, one would suppose, to French women ; and yet no 
lady's toilette was complete without Hume's attendance. At 
the opera his broad unmeaning face was usually seen entre 
deuxjolis minois. The ladies in France gave the ton. and 
the ton was deism ; a species of philosophy ill suited to the 
softer sex, in whose delicate frame weakness is interesting, 
and timidity a charm. . . . How my friend Hume was able 
to endure the encounter of these French female Titans, I 
know not." 1 Some of the scenes in which fashionable soci- 
ety doomed him to enact a part, must have been exquisitely 
comic ; and had his friends intended to ridicule, not to honor 
him, they could hardly have devised any thing better 
adapted to the purpose. The scene described so vividly 
by Madame D'Epinay, must surely have been abundantly 
trying. We have hardly space for the passage, but it is so 
graphic, and indeed so instructive, that Ave cannot resist the 
temptation to give an abridged translation below.' 2 On 

1 Memoires of Charlemont, cited in Burton's Life, vol. ii. p. 223. To 
which we may add the following from Grimm's Correspondence Litter- 
aire: — " Ce quil y a encore de plaisant, rest que toutes les jolies 
femmes so lc sont arrache, et que le gros philosophe Ecossais s'est puis 
dans leur socie'te. C't5st un excellent horame, que David Hume; il 
est naturellement serein, il entend tinement, il (lit quolque-fois arcc 
sel, quoiqu'il parlc peu ; mais il est lourd, il n'a ni chaleur. ni grace, 
ni agre'ment dans l'esprit, ni rien qui soit propre ii s'allier an ratnage 
de its oharmantea pontes machines qu'on appelle jolies femmes. O 
que nous sommes un (bole de people I " — Ibid. 

-"The celebrated David Hume, the great-fat English historian, 
known and esteemed lor his writings, has not equal talents for the 
social amusements for which all our pretty women had decided him 

to l)e fit. He made his debut at the houso of Madame de T 

They had destined him to art the part of a sultan seated between two 
6laves, employing all his eloquence to make them fall in love with 



DAVID HUME. 391 

another occasion still more trying to his gravity, if not to his 
modesty, he was compelled to listen to complimentary har- 
angues from the Dauphin's children, — the youngest of the 
child-orators unhappily breaking down in the middle of his 
address ; we shall give the scene in Hume's own vein of 
quiet pleasantry. It is clear that however nattered by the 
homage received, as other expressions in his letters prove, 
he was by no means insensible to the absurdity of the situa- 
tion in which the extravagance of adulation sometimes 
placed him. " Do you ask me," says he, " about my course 
of life ? I can only say that I eat nothing but ambrosia, 
drink nothing but nectar, breathe nothing but incense, and 
tread on nothing but flowers. Every man I meet, and still 
more, every lady, would think they were wanting in the 
most indispensable duty, if they did not make a long and 

him ; finding them inexorable, he was to seek the cause of their ob- 
stinacy ; he is placed on the sofa between the two prettiest women in 
Paris, he looks at them attentively, keeps striking his hands on his 
stomach and knees, and finds nothing else to say to them than, — ' Eh 
bien ! me demoiselles. . . . Eh bien ! vous voila done ! . . . Eh bien ! 
vous voila . . . vous voila. ici 1 ' This lasted for a quarter of an hour 
without his being able to get any further. One of them at last rose 
impatiently. . . . Since then he has been doomed to the part of a 
spectator, and is not less welcomed and flattered. In truth, the part 
he plays here is most amusing. Unfortunately for him, or rather for 
philosophic dignity (for he seems to accommodate himself very well to 
this mode of life), there was no ruling mania in this country when he 
came here ; under these circumstances he was looked upon as a new 
found treasure, and the enthusiasm of our young heads turned to- 
wards him. All the pretty women are mad about him ; he is at all 
the fine suppers, and there is no good fete without him ; in a word, he 
is among our fashionables what the Genevese are to me." (Memoirs 
and Correspondence de Madame D'Epinay, vol. iii. p. 284.) Well 
might a writer in the Edinburgh Review say, " Since the exhibition of 
the old Fabliaux of Aristotle in love down upon all-fours, and his 
mistress riding on his back — there has been no representation of phi- 
losophy so out of character, as it is shown us in the portrait of Hume 
by Madame d'Epinay." (Ed. Review, January, 1847.) 



392 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

elaborate harangue in my praise. What happened last week, 

when I had the honor of being presented to the D n's 

children, at Versailles, is one of the most curious scenes I 
had yet passed through. The Due de B., the eldest, a boy of 
ten years old, stepped forth and told me how many friends 
and admirers I had in this country, and that he reckoned 
himself in the number, from the pleasure he had received 
from the reading of many passages in my works. When he 
had finished, his brother, the Count de P., who is two years 
younger, began his discourse, and informed me that I had 
been long and impatiently expected in France, and that he 
himself expected soon to have great satisfaction from the 
reading of my fine History. But what is more curious, 
when I was carried thence to the Count D'A., who is but 
four years of age, I heard him mumble something which, 
though he had forgot in the way, I conjectured from some 
scattered words, to have been also a panegyric dictated to 
him. Nothing could more surprise my friends, the Parisian 
philosophers, than this incident." * 

The French of Hume could scarcely have been so bad 
as the malicious wit of Horace Walpole has represented it ; 
if it was, it is hard to believe that, however prone may have 
been the French just at that moment to admire, he should 
have been able to get on in the saloons of Paris at all. 
Even French civility could hardly have kept its counte- 
nance. That it did not refrain from sarcasm we have some 
proofs, while Hume's English acquaintance exercised it 
abundantly. "The French," Bays Walpole with his eiis- 
tojnary cynicism, u believe in Mr. Hume : the only thing in 
the world that they believe implicitly ; for I defy them to 
Understand any language which he speaks." And in a letter 

firsl published in the Suffolk Comtpondenc^ he Bays, with 
still more reckless causticity, "as every thing English is in 

1 Barton, vol. ii. p. 1 7 7 , its. 



DAVID HUME. 393 

fashion, our bad French is accepted into the bargain. Many 
of us are received everywhere. Mr. Hume is fashion itself, 
although his French is almost as unintelligible as his Eng- 
lish." It is not Walpole only, however, that makes himself 
merry with the philosopher's French. One of Rousseau's 
suspicions of Hume was founded on a few words of French 
which he uttered in his sleep. Hume remarked that he was 
not aware that he dreamt in French ; " he could not," 
quietly said M. Morellet. 

Of his quarrel with Rousseau, which made so much noise 
at the time of its occurrence both in England and France, 
Hume, in the little sketch of his life, which comes up to 
within a short period of his death, says not one syllable. It 
certainly was not from thinking it of no importance, for it 
gave him a world of vexation ; indeed he confesses it was 
one of the most painful, as well as the most extraordinary 
that had ever happened to him. It was perhaps partly from 
unpleasant remembrances, that he passed it by ; but also 
probably from a more creditable motive. Angry, and justly 
angry as he had felt at Rousseau's ingratitude and absurdity 
— unphilosophically virulent as his language - 1 had sometimes 
been, he doubtless felt inclined as time rolled on, to acquiesce 
in the views since generally taken, namely, that the French 
philosopher's " egotism " and " sentimentality " were not sel- 
dom undistinguishable from madness ; and whether they had 
produced it or resulted from it might be a fair question. Of 
the whole quarrel, a most copious and interesting account 
will be found in Burton's Life of Hume ; and it is no more 
than just to say that Hume comes out of it in a manner 
highly creditable not only to his honor but to his benevo- 
lence. His friends in France had forewarned him what a 

1 In the celebrated introduction to the letter to Baron cTHolbach, 
in which Hume first explodes in wrath, he says, " Mon cher Baron, 
Jean Jacques est un scele'rat." 



394 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

monster of intractable caprice and infinite egotism he was 
patronizing; — all which he found out when it was too late. 
Surely the scene which he himself paints with so much 
vividness, in which Rousseau, after fantastically misinterpret- 
ing an act of kindness into the most villanous malignity, 
suddenly relents, pops down into the surprised philosopher's 
lap, and sobs and blubbers out his momentary repentance 
amidst tears and kisses, — repentance soon to be followed 
by a relapse into as capricious resentment, — presents a 
picture of Rousseau, of which it is hard to say whether it be 
more pitiable or ludicrous ; while we may easily conceive 
that to one of so " unsentimental " a nature as Hume, his 
involuntary role in so ridiculously " tender scene " must have 
been profoundly mortifying. 

" I endeavored," says Hume, " to pacify you and to divert 
the discourse, but to no purpose. You sat sullen, and was 
either silent, or made me very peevish answers. At last 
you rose up and took a turn or two about the room, when 
all of a sudden, and to my great surprise, you clapped your- 
self on my knee, threw your arms about my neck, kissed me 

with seeming ardor, and bedewed my face with tears 

I was very much affected, I own ; and I believe a vcrv ten- 
der scene passed between us." The description of Rousseau 
is, as may be expected, still richer: 1 

After about two more years (1 707—1700), of political ser- 
vice as under secretary, a post to which he was preferred 
by General Conway, Hume finally retired to Edinburgh, 
and there anticipated a calm philosophic evening o( life in 
the midst of his favorite society. To use his own words he 

was •• very opulent," having a revenue of £1000 a year. 

His society was much courted by men of the highest literary 
reputation, and of the widest diversity of opinions, both 
political and religious. Freed from literary and all other 

1 Biulon, vol. ii. p. 343, 



DAVID HUME. 395 

cares, he entertained, " though somewhat stricken in years, 
the prospect of enjoying long his ease, and seeing the in- 
crease of his reputation." 

These hopes were fallacious. In 1775, appeared the first 
symptoms of that long decay which terminated in his death, 
August, 1776. 

It is but justice to say that all concurrent testimony 
proves him to have borne this slow and harassing, though, 
it seems, by no means painful illness, not only with exem- 
plary fortitude and patience, but with much sweetness of 
temper, and to have contemplated the great change with un- 
diminished serenity. Convinced that his disease was incur- 
able long before his friends would believe it, he refused to 
listen to false predictions of returning health. When Dr. 
Dundas intimated that he should tell his friend, Colonel 
Elphinstone, that he " was much better, and in a fair way of 
recovery," Hume replied, " Doctor, as I believe you would 
not choose to tell any thing but the truth, you had better tell 
him that I am dying as fast as my worst enemies, if I have 
any, could wish, and as easily as my best friends could 
desire." 

Sometimes, it is true, he regarded the approach of the 
last moment with a hilarity strangely unbecoming his situa- 
tion, whether as a philosopher or a man ; and his ill-timed 
pleasantry about Charon's boat might well have been spared. 
John Foster, in his review of Ritchie's Life of the philos- 
opher, has observed, that even on the hypothesis that death 
is an extinction of our being, much more on that of Hume's 
skepticism, which left it uncertain whether death might not 
reveal the truth of what he had been doubting all his life 
long, any thing bordering on levity in such an hour is utterly 
out of place. It is as though a man should laugh and caper 
in the cave of Trophonius. But, in other respects, it can- 
not be denied that Hume's last hours exhibit a serenity 
which, though often exemplified by religion, has rarely been 



396 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

exhibited by philosophy, and still more rarely by a skeptical 
philosophy. 

Foolish inferences have been founded on what cannot 
without gross disingenousness be denied, — the philosophic 
fortitude and tranquillity of Hume's death, — and equally 
foolish attempts made to prove all that fortitude and tran- 
quillity affectation. Experience ought to convince us that 
nothing can be inferred from the adaptation of this or that 
system of philosophy or religion to produce calmness in a 
dying hour, from the phenomena of any individual death- 
bed. The best men have often encountered the great enemy 
with dismay, and the worst with tranquillity. We can as 
little infer from their conduct what death is to disclose, as 
we could infer what is at the bottom of a deep abyss, if we 
saw that, of a thousand men who were compelled to leap 
into it, some madly laughed, and some pusillanimously wept 
on the brink before making the inevitable plunge. It should 
be sufficient to vindicate the superiority at least of a Chris- 
tian's faith to every form of skepticism, that if he has really 
lived in accordance with his hopes and convictions, the nat- 
ural tendency of his sentiments and conduct is to produce 
tranquillity at the last hour, whether from physical causes 
he attains that tranquillity or not ; and that his u immortal 
hopes" — even if they were to prove delusions — are as 
naturally connected with a peaceful close of the great strife 
as any other cause with its effect. Nothing can be more 
true than the pointed declaration of Lord Byron : "Indis- 
putably the firm believers in the Gospel have a great ad- 
vantage over all others, for this simple reason, that, if true. 
they will have their reward hereafter; and, if there be no 
hereafter, they ean be but with the infidel in his eternal 
sleep, having had the assistance of an exalted hope through 
life, without subsequent disappointment, since (at the worst 
for them) 'out of nothing nothing ean arise, not even sor- 
row.'" 



DAVID HUME. 397 

On the other hand, even the least candid of skeptics will 
acknowledge that there is nothing in skepticism itself — least 
of all in such radical, devastating skepticism as that of 
Hume — naturally calculated to soothe a dying hour. 
Though a skeptic may meet it with tranquillity, from frigid- 
ity of temperament or hardihood of character, or fixed 
aversion to look at the future, or from a too complacent esti- 
mate of his own worth, 1 or a deficient moral sensibility, or 
from many other reasons, assuredly there is nothing in the 
native tendency of a skeptic's sentiments to render a death- 
bed more tolerable. 

And that such is the natural impotence of skeptical phi- 
losophy for all such purposes, would seem to be indicated by 
the frequent appeal of skeptics to this " instantia solitaria " 
of Hume's death-bed. The rarity of the phenomenon neu- 
tralizes it as an argument ; if, like the calm or triumphant 
deaths of consistently religious men, such a phenomenon 
were too common to be specially noted at all, it would be 
something to the purpose. 

For Hume's skepticism, charity, we think, may blame- 
lessly make ampler excuse than the generality of readers 
have been disposed to make. One may suspect, considering 
its remarkably early, uniform, and inveterate character, that 
it had to do profoundly with the very structure of his intel- 

1 Hume certainly pronounces his own eloge with sufficient confi- 
dence : " My friends," says he in his autobiography, " never had occa- 
sion to vindicate any one circumstance of my character and conduct." 
If by this he meant to claim exemption only from flagrant vice, there 
are few decent characters in life who could not say as much ; but, with 
a deeper self-knowledge and profounder moral sensibility, most men 
would own that they were conscious of too many failings which men 
knew not, and which God only knew, to permit them to plume them- 
selves on any such grounds. But of the ordinary infirmities of man, 
and especially of the subtle spiritual vices of pride, vainglory, pre- 
sumption, and prejudice, the biography and character of Hume pre- 
sent as little lack as those of other men. 
34 



398 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

lect, and was ab origine far more involuntary than is gener- 
ally the case. It may, in our opinion, be even surmised 
that it was connected with that singular morbid condition 
from which he suffered so much at so early an age. The 
very curious document in which he discloses so freely the 
symptoms which oppressed him has been already referred 
to, and the brief citations we proposed to give will be found 
below ; but the whole letter, first published in Burton's Life 
is well worthy of perusal in extenso. It reveals a condition 
of mind, considering the writer's extreme youth, at least as 
unhealthy as that of the body. At an age when other youths 
are for the most part only too credulous, he was entertaining 
universal doubt; and when others are full of nothing but 
poetry and love, he was presumptuously exploring the deep- 
est problems that can engage the human intellect, and de- 
claring that nothing certain was yet established in philoso- 
phy or morals! At the very time that he was laboring 
under the cloud of hypochondriacal depression, referred to 
in the letter from which we give extracts below, he was in- 
tensely excogitating his philosophy. His whole state was 
unnatural. 1 

1 " Every one who is acquainted cither with the philosophers or 
critics knows that there is nothing yet established in either of these 
two sciences, and that they contain little more than endless disputes, 
even in the most fundamental articles. Upon examination of these, 
I found a certain boldness of temper growing in me, which was not 
inclined to submit to any authority in these subjects, hut led me to 
seek out some new medium by which truth might he established. 
After much study and reflection on this, at last, when I was about 
eighteen years of age, there seemed to be opened up to me a new 

scene of thought, which transported me beyond measure, and made 

me, with an ardor natural to young men, throw up every other pleas- 
ure or business to apply entirely to it I was infinitely happy 

in this course of lift for some months; till at last, about the begin- 
ning of September, 1729, all my ardor seemed in a moment to be 

extinguished, and I could do Longer raise my mind to that pitch 
winch formerly gave me Buch excessive pleasure In this 

dit ion 1 remained for nine months very uneasy to myself, as you may 



DAVID HUME. 399 

At the early age of twenty-two or twenty-three, his phi- 
losophical opinions were already nearly complete — that is, 

well imagine, but without growing any worse, which was a miracle. 
.... Though I was sorry to find myself engaged with so tedious a 
distemper, yet the knowledge of it set me very much at ease, by satis- 
fying me that my former coldness proceeded not from any defect of 
temper or genius, but from a disease to which any one may be subject. 
.... I believe it is a certain fact, that most of the philosophers who 
have gone before us have been overthrown by the greatness of their 
genius, and that little more is required to make a man succeed in 
this study, than to throw off all prejudices either for his own opinions 
or for those of others. At least this is all I have to depend on for 
the truth of my reasonings, which I have multiplied to such a degree, 
that within these three years I find I have scribbled many a quire of 
paper in which there is nothing contained but my own inventions. 
This, with the reading most of the celebrated books in Latin, 
French, and English, and acquiring the Italian, you may think a suffi- 
cient business for one in perfect health, and so it would, had it been 
done to any purpose ; but my disease was a cruel encumbrance on 
me. I found that I was not able to follow out any train of thought 
by one continued stretch of view, but by repeated interruptions, and 
by refreshing my eye from time to time upon other objects. ... I 
have noticed in the writings of the French mystics, and in those of 
our fanatics here, that when they give a history of the situation of 
their souls, they mention a coldness and desertion of the spirit which 
frequently returns ; and some of them at the beginning have been 
tormented with it many years. As this kind of devotion depends 
entirely on the force of passion, and consequently of the animal 
spirits, I have often thought that their case and mine were pretty par- 
allel, and that their rapturous admirations might discompose the fab- 
ric of the nerves and brain as much as profound reflections, and 
that warmth or enthusiasm which is inseparable from them. 

" However this may be, I have not come out of the cloud so well as 
they commonly tell us they have done, or rather begin to despair of 

ever recovering The questions I would humbly propose to 

you are : Whether among all those scholars you have been acquainted 
with, you have ever known any affected in this manner 1 Whether I 
can ever hope for a recovery % Whether I must long wait for it 1 
Whether my recovery will ever be perfect, and my spirits regain their 
former spring and vigor, so as to endure the fatigue of deep and ab- 
struse thinking % " — (Burton, vol. i. p. 31-38.) 



400 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

when he had hardly advanced beyond boyhood. His skep- 
tical tendencies, — thus deeply radicated, and indulged at 
an age so portentously early, — every thing in his nature 
tended to confirm, and nothing in his experience and subse- 
quent history tended to correct. He was of a naturally 
frigid temperament, — entirely without enthusiasm, — with 
little sympathy for the lofty or heroic in sentiment or char- 
acter. Nor, in his after-life was there any thing to develop 
any latent germs of such qualities ; he never passed through 
those agitating scenes of absorbing love, or joy, or sorrow, or 
hope, or fear, which form the discipline of life, and so often 
profoundly modify, and even revolutionize, the human char- 
acter ; which often develop qualities not suspected to exist, 
or shiver into atoms the sentiments and opinions formed in 
youthful inexperience. With only one dominant passion, as 
he himself admits, — that ambition of literary distinction, 
which tended rather to inflame than correct his early love 
of dazzling paradox, — he passed life in respectable epi- 
curean tranquillity. A most commendable frugality made 
him content in youth with very little ; he saw, as years 
rolled on, increasing prosperity in every desirable form, — an 
income which his moderation counted wealth, a steadily in- 
creasing reputation, "troops of friends," flatteries, unin- 
terrupted health, and, in a word, every thing that could lay 
to sleep (as prosperity very generally does) the suscepti- 
bilities and emotions of man's spiritual nature. His bark 
sailed on a smooth sea, and encountered none of those shocks 
or tempests which, more than most things, make the voy- 
ager of life consider whether his ship is constructed and 
equipped as well for the storm as for the calm. It may be 
added, that so habitually deficient is Hume in the sentiment 
of veneration, — so unnatural the apathy with which he 
regards religious phenomena, — so easy, apparently, the en- 
tire extrusion of the subject from his thoughts, — so fright- 
fully contented does he seem with his skepticism, — that, 



DAVID HUME. 401 

though this state of mind was encouraged, no doubt, by the 
too congenial atmosphere of his age, and the French society 
he loved, it is difficult not to infer some abnormality in the 
very original structure of his moral nature ; and it is, the 
kindest apology that can be made for him. 

On any other hypothesis, he cannot be too severely cen- 
sured for the indolent facility with which he seems to have 
acquiesced, in after-life, in his first early conclusions — the 
very immaturity of which might well have awakened sus- 
picion. There is no proof that, when he became a man in 
intellect, he ever seriously revolved them again. He must 
also be blamed for the resolute way in which he evaded or 
silenced every attempt to turn his mind to the reconsidera- 
tion of his opinions. A remarkable instance of this disposi- 
tion to get rid of expostulation occurs in one of his letters 
to Blair, cited by Mr. Burton : " Whenever," says Hume, 
" I have had the pleasure to be in your company, if the dis- 
course turned on any common subject of literature or rea- 
soning, I always parted from you both entertained and 
instructed. But, when the conversation was diverted by 
you from this channel towards the subject of your profes- 
sion — though I doubt not but your intentions were friendly 
towards me — I own I never received the same satisfaction ; 
I was apt to be tired, and you to be angry. I would there- 
fore wish, for the future, whenever my good fortune throws 
me in your way, that these topics should be forborne between 
us. 1 have long since done with all inquiries on such sub- 
jects and have become incapable of receiving instruction." 

Blair's letter, by the way, shows that Hume's Scottish 
clerical admirers did not hesitate to embrace opportunities 
of faithful expostulation as far as Hume's repellent humor 
permitted, and proves how unjust and uncharitable the sus- 
picions which were sometimes founded on the intimacy 
between him and them. A man's Christianity would be 
equivocally evinced by renouncing all intercourse with such 

34* 



402 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

as renounce it ; such conduct would suggest to those thus 
repelled a strange idea of the charity which professed to 
seek their spiritual welfare ! It were rather to be desired 
that every Hume or Gibbon might have for his bosom 
friend a Bishop Butler or a Robert Hall. 

Of the personal and social elements of Hume's character 
it is unnecessary to say any thing, as the subject has been 
so admirably touched by Sir James Mackintosh, in his pre- 
liminary Dissertation. That he was very amiable, and well 
merited the admiration of his friends, cannot be doubted ; 
though the eulogy of Adam Smith, uttered in the first fresh- 
ness of grief at his loss is, as Sir James observes, " an affec- 
tionate exaggeration." " Such a praise," he justly says, ' ; can 
never be earned without passing through either of the 
extremes of fortune, without standing the test of tempta- 
tions, dangers, and sacrifices. It may be said, with truth, 
the private character of Mr. Hume exhibited all the virtues 
which a man of reputable station, under a mild government, 
in the quiet times of a civilized country, has often the oppor- 
tunity to practise." 

In certain respects, Hume presented rather a curious con- 
trast. He was by no means the impassive person his gen- 
eral coldness of temperament would lead us to conclude, 
and by no means the unprejudiced person which a skeptical 
philosophy may be presumed to have a tendency to form, 
and which he would fain be thought. Where his solitary 
passion — literary ambition — was in question, his vanity 
is as impatient, exacting, and querulous as that of any 
mortal ; in spite of constantly brightening prospects and 
widening fame, he is perpetually harping about imaginary 
neglect and imaginary persecution. Similarly as to preju- 
dice ; his bitterness against the English l will just match, 

1 Thus he speaks of the English in 1704 : " That nation arc relaps- 
ing fast into the deepest stupidity and ignorance. The taste (or liter- 
ature is neither decayed nor depraved here as with the barbarians on 



DAVID HUME. 403 

and no more than match, with Johnson's bitterness against 
the Scotch. In these two men, the two nations may justly 
consider themselves quits ; and fortunately are never likely 
to have any more such absurd accounts to settle between 
them. It is the happiness of our age that Englishmen 
would as little tolerate the prejudices of Johnson as Scotch- 
men would those of Hume. But it is in his historical writ- 
ings that Hume's intense capacity of prejudice appears most 
signally. He who was the most skeptical of philosophers 
became, in fact, the most bigoted of historians j with this 
aggravation of his bigotry, however, — that all the acts and 
opinions of which, in his history, he was so keen an apolo- 
gist, were in direct defiance of the general strain of his 
political sentiments and speculations, as disclosed in his Po- 
litical Essays. 

As to his character as a philosopher, his genius will 
probably be more appreciated, and its achievements less 
valued, by successive generations of readers. His capacity 
cannot be well exaggerated. That such a work as the 
Treatise of Human Nature, or the Essays, should have pro- 
ceeded from so young a man, gives an impression of sub- 
tlety, acuteness, and ingenuity seldom, if ever, surpassed. 
But these productions are chiefly remarkable as proofs of 
his genius, and for the searching investigations to which they 
led on the part of others ; not for their intrinsic value. 
System, as both Stewart and Mackintosh observe, he had 
none ; he is constantly shifting his ground, and contradictions 

the banks of the Thames. . . Can you seriously talk of my continuing 
an Englishman ? Am I or are you an Englishman 1 Do they not treat 
with derision our pretensions to that name, and with hatred our just pre- 
tensions to surpass and govern them 3 . . . (1775) I have a reluctance 
to think of settling among the factious bai'barians of London, who 
will hate me because I am a Scotsman, and am not a Whig, and 
despise me because I am a man of letters. . . (1776) It is lamentable 
to think how much that nation has declined in literature in our time." 



404 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

without number may be detected in his writings. The fact 
is, that provided he could find any arguments to support the 
paradox of skepticism which happened to be the theme of 
one essay, he did not care how it might be opposed to some 
other paradox of skepticism which was defended in another 
essay. Thus, while speculatively arguing that neither " in- 
tuition," "demonstration," "experience," nor any other 
conceivable reason, really authorizes us to conclude that 
any one sequence will follow any one antecedent rather than 
another, or that the future will resemble the past, he, in his 
Essay on Miracles, declares all " miracles " utterly incred- 
ible, 1 because they would contradict the uniformity of na- 
ture as ascertained by experience: 2 ambitious to outdo 
Berkeley by annihilating not only matter but mind, and re- 
ducing every thing in the universe to " impressions and 
ideas," he abundantly contradicts himself (but here, to be 
sure, he could not help it) by saying in the same breath, 

1 This inconsistency with his speculative principles is the least de- 
fect in that acute hut sophistical performance. But its fallacies have 
been too often pointed out to need being mentioned here. 

2 " For all inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, 
that the future will resemble the past, and that similar powers will be 
conjoined with similar sensible qualities. If there be any suspicion. 
that the course of nature may change, and that the past may be no 
rule for the future, all experience becomes useless, and can give rise 
to no inference or conclusion. It is impossible, therefore, thai any 
arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to 
the future; since all these arguments are founded on the supposition 
of that resemblance. Let the course of things be allowed hitherto ever 
so regular, that alone, without some new argument or inference, 
proves not that for the future it will continue so. In vain do yon 
pretend to have learned the nature of bodies from your past expe- 
rience*' 1 — (Kssnys, vol. ii., Sceptical Doubts). " A wise man, then lore, 
proportions his belief to the evidence. In such conclusions as are 
founded on an infallible experience, he experts the event with the 

last degree of assurance, and regards his pasi experience as full prw>f 
of the future existence of that event." — {Essays, vol. ii., Mim 



DAVID HUME. 405 

that of the existence of these " impressions and ideas " even 
skepticism cannot doubt, since we — that is, the doubted 
conscious -unity, Mind — cannot but be conscious of them : 
similarly, while affirming, consistently enough in words all 
his life long, his belief in an intelligent First Cause, (and it 
is the only determinate religious tenet which he seems to 
have maintained,) nearly all his speculative reasonings — 
especially his theory of causation — tend to show that of that 
primal truth there cannot be satisfactory proof, and he has 
even furnished atheism with a novel paradox in its support, 
founded on the world's being a " singular effect : " indig- 
nantly repelling, as a perversion of his meaning, the notion 
that he ", had ever asserted so absurd a proposition as that 
any thing might arise without a cause," he has yet so ex- 
pressed himself, that (as has been well said by one of his 
most acute critics) the entire metaphysical world has shared 
in the mistake ! Magnanimously declaring at one time that 
the philosopher must abide by truth, even though it were 
proved pernicious to mankind, — quite in the lofty fiatjus- 
titia ruat ccelum style, — he, at another, advises (and it is a 
deep blot on his character) a skeptical friend to accept church 
preferment, and preach what he did not believe ; affirming 
that " to pique oneself on sincerity in such matters is to put 
too great a respect on the vulgar and their superstitions ! " 
Well may one of his most charitable critics proclaim him- 
self " ashamed to print " the philosopher's words ! Again, 
while in his Essay on Polygamy and Divorce he sees so 
clearly and illustrates so well the infinite importance of 
preserving the domestic relations pure, he speaks, in his 
Inquiry into the Principles of Morals, in an apologetic tone 
of vices which, if freely indulged, would soon dissolve so- 
ciety — an inconsistency which has called forth the just 
animadversion of Sir James Mackintosh. 

In a word, there is no end to the incoherencies of Hume's 
statements, and which are only concealed so long as one 



406 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

essay is not collated with another. He wrote, as it were, 
with the old Roman stylus — a sharp pen at one end, and an 
instrument of erasure at the other. 

His fame as a philosopher, therefore, will rest rather on 
what he was capable of than of what he achieved ; and it 
may be said, by a somewhat similar paradox, that his fame 
as an historian will rest much more on his manner than on 
his matter. His work is everywhere disfigured with g 
defects, inaccuracies, and prejudices, as Hallam, Brodie, 
and many others, have abundantly shown ; but the charm 
of his style embalms and perfumes his errors, and men will 
still be willing to read him — though they disbelieve. 

Not, indeed, that even his style as an historian is wholly 
free from defects. It is cold — that might be expected 
from the frigid temperament of the man. It is wanting in 
imaginativeness and consequently in animation, and the per- 
fection of graphic skill. This fault again is often aggravated 
by superficial knowledge of his materials; for a full mas- 
tery of details is the only thing which can render precise 
statement safe. Thus Hume often omits names and dates 
where they ought to be inserted, and conceals the necessity 
of definite statement in convenient vagueness. His M 
tions are often so general and so adroitly balanced and qual- 
ified, that they seem to betray a consciousness that he is 
standing on delicate ground, and that he had better net 
commit, himself to too much exactness, lest some critic* of 
greater knowledge of details should convict him of inaccu- 
racy. These artifices he employs no doubt with great dex- 
terity, but one would greatly have preferred that there 
should have, been no occasion for them. Still, in spite of all 
these deductions, the narrative is so lueiil. the grouping 90 
admirable, the reflections so unforced and natural, and the 
style Hows on in SUph a Stream of tranquil beauty — Com- 
bining 80 much of flexile grace and natural dignity, that his 
work will ever stand high in the estimate of every culti- 



DAVID HUME. 407 

vated taste. It is an instance of the importance of style, as Sir 
J. Mackintosh remarked of Butler. That profound thinker 
has been often undervalued for want of a style worthy of 
his thoughts ; the work of Hume, in spite of his defects, has 
been raised into one of the most familiar manuals of history 
because it has one. So senseless is that cry which one 
sometimes hears — that style is of little consequence, if facts 
be but stated. So little is this to be expected that though 
Hume's inaccuracies have been exposed a thousand times 
he still maintains, in virtue of his style alone, the place of a 
classic of English history. 

The same qualities of style, are, if possible, more manifest 
in Hume's Philosophical Essays. Amidst that absence of 
all generous enthusiasm which we should expect in so com- 
plete a Pyrrhonist, and a prodigal use of subtle and ingen- 
ious sophistry that would seem to have had no other object 
than to confound and perplex the intellect of the reader, 
they abound in passages which, considered simply as com- 
position, are exquisite specimens of refined simplicity — of 
that severe attic grace which it is evident he had carefully 
studied and cultivated, as well as of a very quiet but most 
elegant pleasantry. And amongst such passages few are 
more striking than those in which the sceptic acknowledges 
the vanity of skepticism. 1 

1 Nothing can be happier than the pleasantry in some of Hume's 
familiar letters, and it makes us regret that we have not more of 
them. We would willingly exchange for them portions either of his 
Essays or his History, bulk for bulk. Light and trivial in comparison 
no doubt they would be, but one might find consolation in thinking 
that elegant triviality was at least as good as grave error or pernicious 
paradox. How graceful is the following badinage : — "I live still, 
and must for a twelvemonth, in my old house in St. James's Court, 
which is very cheerful, and even elegant, but too small to display my 
great talent for cookery — the science to which I intend to addict the 
remaining years of my life ! I have just now lying on the table before 
me a receipt for making soupe a la reine, copied with my own hand. 



408 NEW BIOGRAPHIES. 

The fullest and most authentic account of Hume's Life 
and Writings will be found in Burton's recent Life, to 
which we willingly confess our obligations. 

For beef and cabbage (a charming dish,) and old mutton, and old 
claret, nobody excels me. I make also sheep's head broth, in a man- 
ner that Mr. Keith speaks of it for eight days after ; and the Due 
de Nivernois would bind himself apprentice to my lass to learn it ! I 
have already sent a challenge to David Moncrief; you will see that in 
a twelvemonth he will take to the writing of history (the field I have 
deserted), for, as to giving of dinners, he can now have no further 
pretensions. I should have made a very bad use of my abode in 
Paris, if I could not get the better of a mere provincial like him." 







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